Why is Red Bull Suddenly SO FAST

Red Bull was so fast in the last two races because its final upgrade package of 2026, introduced in Baku in late September, made the RB22 predictable enough for Max Verstappen to drive it on the limit. The team did not redesign the car. It revised the floor, diffuser, sidepods, cooling louvres, mirrors and halo fairing to keep the airflow under and around the car more stable, and that stability gave Verstappen a balance he could finally trust. The results followed in a straight line: a recovery from eighth to second in Azerbaijan, a first pole and first win of the season at Sepang a week later, and then a clean sweep of sprint pole, sprint win, Grand Prix pole and Grand Prix win at Singapore. Two victories in seven days at two completely different circuits, from a car that in March its own driver called undriveable.

Key Takeaways

• Red Bull’s problem in 2026 was never pure speed. The RB22 had an inconsistent balance that swung between understeer and oversteer, and a separate “car degradation” issue that made the rear worse as a session or race went on.
• The Baku package, confirmed by team principal Laurent Mekies as “the last significant upgrade for this year”, changed the floor body, diffuser, sidepods, cooling louvres, mirrors and halo fairing to generate more stable downforce rather than simply more of it.
• The sequence since then reads eighth to second in Baku with Isack Hadjar third, pole and victory at Sepang, then a perfect weekend in Singapore that included Verstappen’s 50th career pole and 73rd win.
• The degradation problem has not been fixed. Technical director Pierre Waché called it “a massive issue” and said he is “not confident” of a complete solution even for 2027, so the current form is about using the car better, not a cured car.
• The swing has real championship consequences: Red Bull is now seven points behind McLaren in the fight for third in the constructors’ standings, 332 to 339, and Verstappen is fourth in the drivers’ table on 221.

To understand why two wins in a week feel so dramatic, it helps to remember where Red Bull started. The 2026 regulations gave every team a new chassis and a new power unit formula at the same time, and Red Bull took on more than anyone: alongside the RB22 it was running its own engine, the Red Bull Ford Powertrains unit, for the first time. The opening rounds were the team’s worst start in more than a decade. Verstappen was sixth in Australia, retired from the Chinese Grand Prix with a coolant fault, and dragged an “undriveable” car from eleventh on the grid to eighth at Suzuka, after which he told the team the situation was “not sustainable”. Seven months later he arrived in Austin as the winner of the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia and the Singapore Grand Prix, and the questions have flipped from what is wrong with Red Bull to whether anyone can stop it.

What was actually wrong with the RB22?

Two things, and neither was the engine. The first was balance. For most of the season the RB22 did not have a stable handling character that the drivers could build a weekend around. Sometimes the front would wash out into understeer; in other corners, or later in the same session, the rear would let go and the car would oversteer. Verstappen’s request after Japan was pointedly modest. He asked for “a more stable balance”, not more downforce, because a driver cannot commit to a corner when he does not know which end of the car will give up first. Mekies admitted after China that the package showed “some significant shortcomings” in performance terms, and there was no single mechanical fault the engineers could point to. The weakness was spread across several areas of the car at once.

The second problem was stranger and, by Red Bull’s own admission, still unresolved. The team calls it car degradation, and it is not tyre wear. Over the course of a session or a race, the car’s behaviour itself deteriorated, mostly at the rear axle, leaving the drivers with a harder and harder car to manage the longer they ran. It was never slow in the sense of lacking peak pace. Verstappen finished second in Hungary in July and could sometimes show up at the front in a single session. What Red Bull could not do was reproduce that performance from Friday to Sunday, or from the start of a stint to the end of it. Getting the RB22 into its narrow operating window and keeping it there was the whole challenge of the season.

The issue became public at Monza. After qualifying sixth, three tenths behind Pierre Gasly’s surprise pole, Verstappen described the RB22 over the radio as a “paper car”, and later said the problem was “lap time that you’re giving away” rather than anything dangerous. He also pointed out that similar behaviour had troubled Red Bull across multiple seasons, despite the completely different regulations for 2026. Mekies agreed with him, in part: “There is an element of car performance degradation that is happening through a session and through a race,” he said on September 21. “I consider it a complex issue. Otherwise, we would get to the bottom of it.” Asked when it would be fixed, he said: “It will not be fast, so it’s something that will probably take us through next year.”

What did Red Bull change in Baku?

Red Bull had been working at the problem all year. It introduced revised floors in Miami and Austria, and the Austrian package was good enough to put the car into race-winning contention at the team’s home circuit. But the biggest late-season step came at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where the team unveiled what Mekies confirmed was “most probably our last significant package” of 2026. Rather than replacing the car’s aerodynamic concept, the package refined how air travels around and underneath the existing one, and it touched more components than its modest billing suggested.

The part of the package that deserves the most attention is the region around the rear wheels. Rotating tyres throw off turbulent, messy airflow, and if that turbulence reaches the diffuser it reduces how effectively the whole floor works. Red Bull reworked the floor edges, deflectors and surrounding geometry precisely to control that interaction. That matters because the RB22’s problems were concentrated at the rear. A floor that keeps clean air flowing to the diffuser even as the car rolls, pitches and brakes is a floor whose downforce does not come and go unpredictably, and a car whose rear downforce is predictable is a car that does not surprise its driver with oversteer.

Why did the upgrade make the car easier to drive?

Because the goal was consistency, not peak downforce. A car that produces huge aerodynamic load but constantly changes its balance is still a car the driver cannot exploit, since every braking zone becomes a guess. Red Bull’s engineers were trying to make the RB22 behave the same way lap after lap through the corners and under braking, and the Baku package was the final piece of that work rather than a stand-alone qualifying boost. The drivers noticed immediately. Hadjar, returning from three races out with a wrist injury, said before the race that the car “feels stronger” than the one he had driven in Hungary, and afterwards that “the upgrades worked well there, which was positive”. Verstappen was more specific after Sepang: “The upgrades have pushed some of the weaknesses out of the car. When they work, you gain lap time, you have a better overall balance in the car. With tyres that are very sensitive to balance, that gives you also more lap time.”

That last sentence is the key to the whole turnaround. The 2026 Pirelli tyres punish a car that slides, and a car that slides unpredictably is impossible to manage over a stint. Give Verstappen a balance he can read and he does two things at once: he extracts the performance that was already in the car, and he looks after the tyres while doing so. Nobody at Red Bull has put a figure on how many tenths the Baku upgrade was worth on its own, and with several components changed together, plus a season of earlier development, it would be misleading to credit one floor with everything. But the before-and-after is not subtle.

How did the results change after Baku?

Baku was the proof of concept. Verstappen’s qualifying was wrecked by engine-related trouble and yellow flags that left him eighth, so Red Bull could not simply start at the front and control the race. Instead he had to come through the field, and he did, climbing to third within seven laps and finishing 0.196 seconds behind George Russell in the closest finish for years, with Hadjar third. The result mattered, but the feedback mattered more: both drivers said the car felt better through corners and under braking, which was exactly the sensation Red Bull had spent months trying to give them.

Sepang was the breakthrough, and it was far from straightforward. Verstappen topped the first practice session and took his first pole of the season, almost three tenths clear of Lewis Hamilton. Then the race was delayed 93 minutes by a storm and the FIA’s wet-weather software bug, and when it finally started Verstappen was beaten into Turn 1 by both Mercedes. Red Bull’s decision to switch him from intermediates to slicks under the first Safety Car won back the positions, and from there he controlled the race through further interruptions to win by 2.307 seconds from Kimi Antonelli. It was his 72nd career win and the first ever for the Red Bull Powertrains engine. But with rain, safety cars and the software chaos all in play, it was hard to separate car performance from circumstance.

Singapore removed that doubt. Marina Bay is a slow, bumpy, traction-limited street circuit of the kind that had troubled Red Bull in previous seasons, Verstappen had never won there, and the weekend was dry on Sunday. He took sprint pole, won the damp sprint by 2.591 seconds from Hamilton, then beat Charles Leclerc to Grand Prix pole by 0.054 seconds for the 50th pole of his career, making him only the fifth driver to reach that number after Senna, Schumacher, Hamilton and Vettel. On Sunday, his 250th Grand Prix start, he defended into Turn 1, built a gap on softs, switched to mediums and won by 7.335 seconds. Two wins in seven days at Sepang and Singapore, circuits with almost nothing in common, is the strongest possible evidence that the improvement is in the car rather than the conditions.

Is the Red Bull now the fastest car in Formula 1?

Not on the evidence so far, and Red Bull is the first to say so. The margins have been small. Baku was decided by two tenths in Mercedes’ favour, and the Singapore pole was 0.054 seconds over a Ferrari, so this is not a team that has suddenly found half a second on the field. The degradation problem has also not gone away. Four days before Baku, Waché called it “a massive issue”, and when asked whether he was confident of fixing it completely for 2027 he answered: “I’m not confident. Otherwise, I will stop working.” Mekies has said the fix will likely require bigger design and chassis changes than the RB22 can take, which is why the remaining development budget has already gone to next year’s car.

It is also worth separating Red Bull’s gains from its rivals’ problems. Mercedes had its weakest weekend of the year in Singapore and lost a power unit with Russell at Sepang. Ferrari’s race pace has lagged its qualifying pace, and McLaren has not been in the fight for wins since the summer. Red Bull’s execution, from the slick-tyre call at Sepang to a faultless weekend at Marina Bay, was better than anyone’s, and that counts for a lot when four teams are within a few tenths. What the results show is that Red Bull has found a much more effective way to use the car it already had. The engineers have not eliminated every weakness, but they have moved the ones that were limiting the drivers out of the way.

What does it mean for the 2026 championship?

The drivers’ title is beyond reach. Antonelli leads on 340 points, and his closest challenger is his own team-mate Russell on 238, with Hamilton third on 229. Verstappen’s perfect weekend in Singapore lifted him to fourth on 221, with Leclerc fifth on 215 and Lando Norris sixth on 201, so the Red Bull driver is now in a four-way fight for second that he was nowhere near two months ago. Antonelli can clinch the championship in Austin if he out-scores Russell by 24 points.

The constructors’ battle is where the turnaround bites hardest. Mercedes lead on 578 and Ferrari are second on 444, but McLaren’s hold on third has shrunk to seven points: 339 against Red Bull’s 332 after the double-win weekend. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella described the position as fragile. “Seven points is nothing,” he said. “We need circuits that suit us, and quickly.” With six rounds remaining and Red Bull scoring at a rate McLaren has not matched since the summer, third place is now Red Bull’s to lose.

What happens next?

Formula 1 heads to the Circuit of the Americas for the United States Grand Prix on October 23-25, round 18 of 23 and the first leg of a triple-header with Mexico City and São Paulo. Austin’s fast, flowing first sector and long traction zones will test the RB22 in a third very different way, and Verstappen has four wins there, one short of Hamilton’s record. Red Bull has proved its 2026 car can win again. What it has not yet proved is that it can keep doing so once the rest of the grid arrives with its own late-season updates, and with no more significant upgrades coming for the RB22, the next six races will show whether the Baku package was a turning point or a well-timed peak.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was Red Bull so fast in the last two races?

Because its final upgrade package of 2026, introduced in Baku, made the RB22’s balance predictable enough for Max Verstappen to drive it on the limit. The revised floor, diffuser, sidepods, cooling louvres, mirrors and halo fairing kept airflow to the rear of the car more stable, which cured the swings between understeer and oversteer that had limited the drivers all season.

What did Red Bull upgrade on the RB22 in Baku?

A new floor body and diffuser, reshaped sidepods, revised cooling louvres, new mirrors and a small change to the halo fairing. Team principal Laurent Mekies confirmed it was the last significant upgrade of the season.

What is Red Bull’s “car degradation” problem?

A loss of car performance, mainly at the rear axle, that develops during a session or race and is separate from tyre wear. Verstappen called the car a “paper car” at Monza because of it. Red Bull says it cannot fully fix the issue on the RB22 and that technical director Pierre Waché is “not confident” of a complete solution even for 2027.

How many races has Verstappen won in 2026?

Two, both since the Baku upgrade: the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia at Sepang on October 4 and the Singapore Grand Prix on October 11. They were the 72nd and 73rd wins of his career, and the first two for the Red Bull Ford Powertrains engine.

Can Red Bull beat McLaren to third in the constructors’ championship?

Yes. After Singapore, McLaren has 339 points and Red Bull 332, a gap of seven with six rounds remaining. Red Bull has out-scored McLaren heavily over the last three rounds, so third place now depends on whether McLaren’s car suits the final circuits better than the upgraded RB22.