One of the more revealing threads to emerge from the latest round of Formula 1 discussion is that Red Bull’s 2026 story may not be centered on its all-new power unit after all. Instead, based on the comments circulating around Isack Hadjar’s blunt assessment and Kimi Antonelli’s remarks on Ferrari’s ADUO status, the conversation is converging on a different conclusion: Red Bull’s bigger issue appears to be the car itself.
Hadjar’s quote cut straight to the point. In his telling, the engine is not the problem. “We have a good power unit, the engine is good, everything,” he said. “It’s just the chassis side is terrible. Just slow in the corners.” That kind of line inevitably detonated across fan discussion, not just because of how direct it was, but because it seemed to validate what many had already been observing on track. The immediate reaction was that the chassis department would not forget a public remark like that, and the joking that followed only underscored how sharply the statement landed. The point beneath the memes, though, was serious: if a driver is willing to separate the power unit from the rest of the package this clearly, then the weakness is no longer being framed as a vague team-wide underperformance. It is being pinned to a specific part of the car.
That is why so much of the surrounding analysis focused on cornering performance. The view taking shape here is that the Red Bull package is being exposed most clearly in slow and medium-speed sections, with one comment describing the RB22 as struggling “very heavily in slow and medium corners,” and another summing that up with the biting punchline: “So all corners?” Even where that exaggerates for effect, it captures the broader mood. The perceived deficiency is not minor or niche. It is being treated as fundamental.
The first set of discussion laid out that belief in fairly coherent fashion. The suggestion was that Albert Park may have flattered Red Bull because of its high-speed profile, allowing the power unit to carry more of the load. In that reading, Isack Hadjar qualifying P3 there and Max recovering from P20 to P6 became examples not of a well-rounded car, but of an engine masking a weak chassis in conditions that suited it. By contrast, China and Suzuka were presented as the weekends where the weakness became much more obvious. If the car is indeed poor in slower and medium-speed corners, then those venues would naturally reveal more of its limitations.
That reading also helps explain why several commenters pushed back against any doomposting directed at Red Bull’s engine program. The argument repeated throughout the discussion was that the engine might actually be one of the better elements of the project. More than one comment pointed toward rumors that Red Bull Powertrains could have the second-best power unit, ahead of Ferrari, and one of the most striking takeaways from Antonelli’s Ferrari-related quote was the implied hierarchy behind it. If Ferrari has been granted ADUO while Mercedes remains the benchmark, then the natural question becomes which manufacturers are above or below the threshold for extra development opportunities. The interpretation many fans drew was that Red Bull may not have received ADUO precisely because its engine is already competitive enough.
That is what makes the contrast so brutal. Imagine debuting your first in-house power unit, apparently producing something respectable enough not to need extra catch-up allowances, yet still running as what one commenter called the fifth-best team on the grid. That is the kind of role reversal fans keep coming back to. For years, Red Bull has been associated with chassis excellence. Now the tone of the discussion is almost the exact opposite: the engine may be good, but the car in the corners is not.
That reversal is why the Newey split continues to loom over all of this. One of the strongest lines in the thread described the Red Bull-Newey separation as a divorce where neither side got the house, the kids, or the dog. It is a joke, but it is also a concise summary of how messy the competitive fallout now looks. The implication running through the comments is that Red Bull has lost the defining advantage that used to make the team feel structurally stronger than its rivals. Rather than retaining its famous chassis magic while building a decent power unit, the perception now is that Red Bull may have done the opposite: built a credible engine while losing the aerodynamic and mechanical sharpness that used to define it.
Some fans pushed that even further, arguing that the split makes Aston Martin’s current struggles look almost irrelevant by comparison, because the deterioration on Red Bull’s side is doing more than anything else to reinforce Newey’s reputation. Others thought that was too simplistic and instead pointed to Rob Marshall’s departure as the more significant explanation for the chassis decline. In that view, McLaren’s chassis progress since Marshall’s move only sharpens the contrast with Red Bull’s current weakness. Either way, the common theme is that the conversation around Red Bull’s decline is no longer centered on one variable. It is now a broader post-Newey, post-Marshall, post-Horner power shift discussion, with fans trying to pinpoint exactly which departure or structural change mattered most.
Another major thread in the conversation is whether Red Bull’s current problem is the result of strategic choices made last year. Several commenters argued that the team compromised its 2026 foundation by continuing to develop the 2025 car in order to chase McLaren. In that interpretation, Red Bull essentially spent resources trying to save a title fight rather than committing fully to the new regulations, and is now paying the price with a weaker chassis package. Others defended that decision, noting that Red Bull got within two points of the Drivers’ Championship and produced one of the best title fights in recent memory. There was also a more technical defense: that the team’s tools were not great, so pushing development on the old car helped improve understanding and correlation between the real car, the simulator, and the wind tunnel. That argument makes the decision sound less like short-term desperation and more like an attempt to fix deeper methodological weaknesses.
But even those defending the choice are not denying the present problem. They are merely arguing that the trade-off might still have been rational at the time. With hindsight, the critics say, Red Bull sacrificed a year to win nothing. Defenders counter that the team is not irreparably broken if the engine is decent and the chassis can be fixed. Yet the very fact that this is the debate tells its own story. Nobody is discussing Red Bull as the complete benchmark package anymore. The discussion has shifted to whether the team can repair a flawed platform quickly enough to recover.
That brings the wind tunnel discussion into sharper focus. One of the more substantive explanations offered for Red Bull’s chassis difficulties was its old wind tunnel, described as “ancient,” with correlation issues said to have hit both the RB20 and RB21. From there, the questions become more strategic. If Red Bull knows its tunnel is a weakness, why continue using it while waiting for the new one? Why not use Racing Bulls’ facility in Italy or pay for access elsewhere, as other teams have done? The pushback to that idea was pragmatic: legal, logistical, financial, contractual, and calibration-related barriers could make a switch far less straightforward than fans assume. And because Racing Bulls remains its own team, there are limits on how freely facilities and car design knowledge can be shared. Even if a better tunnel were available, moving over would not simply mean flipping a switch.
Still, the frustration behind that line of questioning is telling. Fans are no longer asking why Red Bull is only slightly off. They are asking why a known structural weakness was allowed to remain in place long enough to become central to the team’s competitiveness.
In the middle of all of this sits Ferrari, and Antonelli’s quote added another layer to the wider 2026 engine narrative. His point was simple: Ferrari has been granted ADUO, which means it can continue developing the power unit. Since the car is already seen as very fast, any engine improvement could move Ferrari even closer. The fan response immediately turned to explaining ADUO for the wider audience: Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities, introduced for manufacturers deemed too far behind the benchmark engine to let them bring extra components and close the gap. That explanation became the basis for a much broader discussion about whether ADUO is merely a mechanism to keep the field honest or whether it could become a genuine championship-shaping device.
Some saw it as basically an engine-side balancing tool, a way of making the gap to Mercedes less ugly. Others pushed back, arguing it is not a simple balance-of-performance mechanism because it does not automatically equalize anything; it merely gives manufacturers more scope to improve, and whether they capitalize on that is still up to them. There was also the important caveat that the FIA has apparently left room for corrective action if ADUO-generated upgrades create a “competitive imbalance,” which immediately triggered skepticism. Fans questioned what “good faith” discussions with manufacturers would actually look like if one company used the extra freedom too well. But beneath the jokes and cynicism, the key implication was obvious: if Ferrari already has a very fast car and now has room to extract more from the engine, that is a worrying sign for everyone else.
For Red Bull, though, Antonelli’s quote was notable for a different reason. It intensified the suggestion that the team’s power unit may actually be one of the few things going right. Multiple comments interpreted the ADUO picture to mean that everyone except Mercedes and Red Bull had been granted extra opportunities, or at least that Red Bull was rumored not to have received them. If that is the case, then the conclusion fans are drawing is stark. Red Bull’s first engine is, by rumor, already close enough to the benchmark not to qualify for catch-up provisions. That should be a massive success story. Instead, it is being overshadowed because the overall car is still not good enough.
And that is where the two discussions merge into one. Hadjar’s quote and Antonelli’s quote are not isolated talking points. Together, they are helping form a broader picture of the current competitive landscape. Ferrari may have a fast car and more engine headroom. Mercedes remains the benchmark on the power unit side. Red Bull, surprisingly, may have produced a solid engine immediately. But if the chassis really is “terrible,” as Hadjar put it, then all of that engine promise becomes secondary.
That is also why the fan discourse around Red Bull has become so cutting. The team is now being framed as the victim of its own structural decisions: a corporate reorganization that some believe stripped away the essence of how a successful F1 team should be run, a continued reliance on flawed infrastructure, a possible overcommitment to last year’s development race, and the cumulative effect of high-profile technical departures. Some commenters suggested Red Bull GmbH may be learning that you cannot simply turn a Formula 1 team into a conventional corporate system and expect the same results. The comparison to Mercedes was raised immediately, but even that came with the caveat that Mercedes’ evolution was not as sudden and that, crucially, it had Toto Wolff to anchor the process.
There is also an undercurrent of disbelief in how quickly the narrative has inverted. Early in testing, when the Red Bull looked competitive, some took that as proof the team had once again threaded the needle between finishing one rules cycle strongly and starting the next one well. Now, as the weaknesses become clearer, those early confident takes have gone quiet. One commenter noted that people jump to all kinds of conclusions during testing because everyone is starved for content, which feels especially apt here. The car that once looked like a possible continuation of Red Bull’s adaptability is now being talked about as a cautionary example of how misleading that period can be.
The strongest conclusion supported by both sets of discussion is that Red Bull’s 2026 issue is not being treated as a failure of the power unit project. If anything, the opposite is happening. Fans are increasingly willing to credit the engine, or at least suspend judgment against it, while directing criticism at the chassis, the tools behind it, and the organizational choices that may have shaped it. Hadjar’s comments gave that perception a blunt internal voice. Antonelli’s Ferrari remarks, and the resulting ADUO discussion, only reinforced the idea by shifting focus toward which manufacturers actually need help and which do not.
So the uncomfortable takeaway for Red Bull is this: the team may have cleared one of the biggest hurdles of the new regulations by producing a credible engine, only to find that its traditional area of strength has become its most visible weakness. That is not the story anyone expected when this rules cycle began. But based on the material shared here, it is very much the story fans now believe they are watching unfold.