The most consequential technical verdict of Formula 1’s new-era season has never actually been published. It was handed down privately in the Monaco paddock, and it told the sport’s newest engine manufacturer the one thing nobody in Milton Keynes wanted to hear: that Red Bull-Ford Powertrains had built the best internal combustion engine on the grid. The reward for topping that table is nothing at all. The Red Bull ADUO ranking exists to hand catch-up development to manufacturers judged to be behind — and on the FIA’s numbers, Red Bull is not one of them.
Why it matters: ADUO, the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities mechanism, is the only route through which a manufacturer can spend beyond 2026’s frozen homologation rules. Mercedes High Performance Powertrains was awarded one development token. Ferrari, Audi and Honda were each granted two upgrade opportunities. Red Bull, the only outfit on the grid building a Formula 1 power unit for the first time, was given none — and has spent the months since trying to have that finding reopened.
How the Red Bull ADUO ranking landed so badly
The FIA had a public announcement of the first period’s results ready to go at Monaco. It was never issued. As Motorsport.com reports, that silence traces back to Red Bull’s considerable unhappiness behind the scenes, with senior executive Oliver Mintzlaff drawn into the argument.
The problem was that Red Bull had almost nowhere to take the complaint. The only formal avenue open to the team was a request for a factual review of the numbers — a recount rather than a reinterpretation. Team principal Laurent Mekies has been blunt about how the ranking reads from inside the garage, arguing there is “not a single data point” suggesting Red Bull-Ford Powertrains has the best engine in Formula 1. The factual check appears not to have shifted the outcome.
A system that measures only half of a hybrid
Red Bull’s frustration is not simply the frustration of a team that lost. The mechanism itself has an acknowledged design flaw, and the FIA has already conceded as much. ADUO ranks manufacturers on internal combustion performance alone, yet the upgrade opportunities it awards can be spent on the electrical side of the power unit too — a significant asymmetry in a formula where the split between the two is close to 50/50.
FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis has said he was open to folding more parameters into the assessment, turbo size among them. The teams and manufacturers, however, pushed hard last year to keep the system as simple as possible. Having written that simplicity into the regulations themselves, the grid now has to live with it for at least this season; nothing about the framework can realistically be rewritten mid-championship.
Everything now rests on the second assessment
The second ADUO period closed after the Hungarian Grand Prix, and its results are still to come. That is Red Bull’s remaining lifeline in 2026 — a fresh set of measurements, taken across a stretch of the season in which the competitive picture has moved considerably, and a second chance to be classified as a manufacturer that needs help rather than one that does not.
The stakes are easy to state. Ferrari and McLaren have been upgrading at a rate even Mercedes says it cannot match, Red Bull’s Dutch Grand Prix ended in the barriers, and the team has just tied Max Verstappen to a contract running to 2030 on the promise that the engine project comes good. A second ADUO ruling that again finds nothing wrong with Red Bull’s power unit would be, in the eyes of its own management, the least welcome compliment in the sport.
