When Red Bull Racing cut ties with Honda at the end of 2021, the paddock consensus was that the Milton Keynes outfit had taken on an enormous risk. Building a works power unit from scratch, even with Honda’s intellectual property as a foundation, was the kind of gamble that could define or derail a dynasty. Three years on, with Ford now deeply embedded in the Red Bull Powertrains programme, early 2025 data is beginning to suggest that gamble is paying off in ways that are making Mercedes take notice.
A Partnership Built for the Long Game
The Red Bull Powertrains and Ford collaboration was never designed to deliver overnight results. When Ford officially announced its return to Formula 1 as a works partner in 2023, the primary focus was always the sweeping regulatory reset arriving in 2026, which introduces a heavily electrified power unit architecture that will effectively reset the competitive order. But the development work happening in the background has quietly accelerated progress on the current-generation unit as well.
Red Bull’s power unit lineage traces back directly to Honda, whose engineers effectively handed over their IP and supported the transition before stepping back from the sport. That foundation gave Red Bull Powertrains a head start that a clean-sheet project would never have enjoyed. Ford’s engineering resources and investment have since layered additional capability onto that base, and the results are beginning to show in competitive metrics that matter on race weekends.
Straight-Line Numbers That Surprised the Paddock
In the opening rounds of the 2025 season, Red Bull’s straight-line speed data drew attention from rival technical departments. Speed trap figures and energy deployment analysis from Bahrain and the early flyaway races indicated that the Red Bull Ford unit had made measurable progress, narrowing a gap to the Mercedes HPP power unit that had looked daunting as recently as the second half of 2024.
The significance of that progress was not lost on Mercedes. Toto Wolff’s comments following the Bahrain Grand Prix acknowledged Red Bull’s power unit development trajectory, a notable admission from a team that has long held the benchmark position in F1’s power unit hierarchy. For a works engine programme still in its relative infancy to draw that kind of recognition underlines how seriously the Red Bull Ford project is now being taken.
What made the early-season picture complicated was that Red Bull’s chassis was underperforming relative to expectations in the opening races. The RB21 arrived with setup and balance issues that suppressed lap time and masked the true contribution of the power unit. Analysts separating power unit performance from chassis performance in technical breakdowns noted that the engine metrics were stronger than the overall results suggested.
The April Development Push and What It Revealed
Red Bull used the April break in the 2025 calendar to push through a significant package of chassis updates, and the impact was immediate. With the car behaving closer to its design intent, the underlying performance of the power unit became easier to evaluate in a race context. Technical analysis from that period pointed to a clearer picture of where Red Bull Powertrains now sits relative to the established benchmark.
The conclusion from that analysis was encouraging for the Red Bull Ford programme. When the chassis is working, the power unit is not the limiting factor it once appeared to be. That represents a genuine shift in the competitive landscape. In recent seasons, rivals running Mercedes customer power units could reliably expect a performance cushion in power-sensitive sectors. That cushion is compressing.
For Ford, the trajectory matters enormously from a brand perspective. The American manufacturer staked its Formula 1 return on the promise of genuine works competitiveness, not a badge on a customer deal. Demonstrating meaningful progress against Mercedes in 2025 strengthens the narrative ahead of 2026, when the full works collaboration will be fighting for wins and championships with a clean-sheet power unit design.
Context: Why Beating Mercedes Still Matters Even Before 2026
It would be easy to frame all of Red Bull Powertrains’ current work as purely a warm-up act for the 2026 regulations. That framing undersells what is happening in the present. Every race kilometre logged in 2025, every data point gathered on reliability, deployment strategy, and thermal management, feeds directly into the engineering knowledge base that will shape the 2026 unit.
The Mercedes HPP power unit has been the gold standard in Formula 1 for over a decade. Even after the competitive upheaval of the 2022 regulation change, Mercedes retained a power unit advantage that customer teams actively sought out. Red Bull Racing, running their own hardware, had to find performance elsewhere to stay at the front. The fact that the power unit conversation is now shifting from a Red Bull liability to a genuine competitive asset is one of the more consequential technical stories of the current season.
The competitive implications extend beyond Red Bull Racing itself. The broader grid watches power unit development cycles closely. Any indication that Red Bull Ford is approaching Mercedes-level output affects the calculations of teams considering their supply options and raises the stakes for what 2026 will look like.
Red Bull’s journey from Honda dependent to works power unit manufacturer has been one of the most ambitious technical projects in recent Formula 1 history. The early evidence from 2025 suggests the programme is maturing faster than many outside observers expected. With Ford’s full engineering commitment now woven into the development process and 2026 approaching as the real proving ground, the gap to Mercedes is narrowing at a pace that should concern the establishment. Whether Red Bull can convert progress into outright power unit superiority before the new regulations arrive remains the defining question, but for the first time in this programme’s short history, that outcome looks like a genuine possibility rather than an aspirational target.