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“What we’re doing is legal,” insists Red Bull’s engine boss Ben Hodgkinson.
Though we’ve only seen two liveries – three if you count Cadillac’s camo version for Barcelona – and some dark and blurry images of an actual (Cadillac) car, the 2026 season is already mired in controversy.
At the heart of it is the claim that Mercedes and Red Bull have found a means of using a loophole in the engine regulations to improve performance to the point that they gain as much as 15 horsepower, around 0.3s a lap, while also aiding fuel efficiency.
Following complaints from rivals, all the manufacturers are to attend a meeting with the FIA next week to discuss the situation is the hope that the season-opener in Melbourne isn’t overshadowed by protests.
Audi, Ferrari and Honda have voiced concern that while compression ratios are capped at 16:0, Mercedes and Red Bull have found a means whereby the power units meet the regulations in ambient temperatures, then, once things heat up, the ratio increases.
“I think there’s some nervousness from various power unit manufacturers that there might be some clever engineering going on in some teams,” said Ben Hodgkinson at the unveiling of the Red Bull teams’ liveries, according to Autosport. “I’m not quite sure how much of it to listen to, to be honest,” he added.
“I’ve been doing this a very long time and it’s almost just noise,” he insisted. “You just have to play your own race really.
“I know what we’re doing,” said Hodgkinson, who joined Red Bull Powertrains in 2022 after twenty years at Mercedes HPP “and I’m confident that what we’re doing is legal.
“Of course, we’ve taken it right to the very limit of what the regulations allow,” he admitted. “I’d be surprised if everyone hasn’t done that. My honest feeling is that it’s a lot of noise about nothing. I expect everyone’s going to be sitting at 16, that’s what I really expect.”
Article C5.4.3 of the regulations states that: “No cylinder of the engine may have a geometric compression ratio higher than 16.0. The procedure to measure this value will be detailed by each PU Manufacturer according to the Guidance Document FIA-F1-DOC-C042 and executed at ambient temperature. This procedure must be approved by the FIA Technical Department and included in the PU Manufacturer homologation dossier”.
However, Article C1.5, states that “Formula 1 Cars must comply with these regulations in their entirety at all times during a competition”.
Its legality aside, (team boss) Laurent Mekies’ claims that the team has a “mountain to climb” and will be “trailing” its rivals at the start of the season.
“We know it’s going to come with some difficulties,” he told Sky Sports. “We know we are going to have quite a few sleepless nights and a few headaches, but please bear with us for the first few months.
“Nobody underestimates the size of the mountain that we have to climb,” he added. “It’s the sort of challenge we all want to be associated with, and hopefully, eventually we will come out on top.
“I think it would be naive, to say the least, for us to think that, yes, we have done everything from zero, with great support from Ford, and then we turn up at the first race and we are the same level as people that have been doing it for many years. It’s not going to be like that, we are going to be trailing them.”
Hodgkinson disagrees.
“I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” he said, “so everything I do has got to be backed up by the belief I can do it. I don’t think you belong in this industry if you don’t believe that.
“It’s almost part of my own personal ethos,” he continued, “but I think that if you show me a confident engineer, I’ll show you one that’s about to lose.
“You can never underestimate where everybody is,” he admitted. “You always have to assume you’re behind so that you always push the absolute maximum.
“What am I confident about? I’m confident that the team I’ve built is incredible. I’m confident the facilities we put together are going to be benchmark. But we’re a newcomer. We had to build factories while people started developing engines so I think we started behind. But I think the people and the facilities we’ve got are better than everybody else.
“So, watch this space. Will I overtake them by race one? I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Asked about claims that, as in 2014, Mercedes has got it right and will be setting the pace from the outset, Hodgkinson said: “I think a lot of that talk originated from Mercedes themselves.
“My gran used to say, an empty can rattles the loudest,” he added. “We’ll let the results do the talking, I think. Mercedes are a very competent power unit manufacturer. I spent twenty years there. So, I know it very, very well.
“I was able to make sure that everything that we did here was better than it was done previously.”
