DETROIT, Michigan — Fans crammed into the restored Michigan Central train station for Ford Racing’s 2026 season launch, the vibes electric with anticipation.
Actor Dax Shepard emceed, guiding the crowd through Ford’s different racing ventures. Rallying videos were projected on the Guastavino-tile vaulted ceiling, and 2023 NASCAR Cup Series champion Ryan Blaney drove in Ford’s new Mustang Dark Horse SC. The car will make its Cup Series debut in 2027.
Familiar Formula One faces have joined the Ford organization. Former Williams driver Logan Sargeant is its newest factory driver (and will race for the brand in the 2027 World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class). And F1 fan-favorite Daniel Ricciardo took the stage to talk about the Raptor brand.
And as the event wore on, one feeling stuck out: It felt very Red Bull. The team has never been afraid to forge its own F1 path in a championship with such a long history. The music blaring from its garage can be heard up and down the paddock as F1 travels around the world.
Red Bull, and F1 sister team Racing Bulls, aren’t afraid to show personality and be bold. With the creative videos used to introduce both operations in Detroit, their identities shone through in an unapologetic way.
All this further underlines the commonalities between Red Bull and Ford as they embark on a new technical partnership in F1 (though it was officially announced in 2023 on a similarly freezing day in New York).
In the three years since the joint venture was confirmed, the companies have been working together to develop a new hybrid engine to meet F1’s revised rules.
The championship’s technical regulations are undergoing a significant change coming into the 2026 season with nearly every aspect of the car impacted – including the aerodynamic chassis parts, as well as the new engines.
The first car liveries for this technical partnership were revealed in Detroit, with both Red Bull and Racing Bulls featuring blue in some fashion. The real shapes of the two cars the teams will field will be revealed in preseason testing, which is set to start next week with a private first test in Barcelona, Spain.
There’s a lot at stake for Ford, Red Bull and Racing Bulls coming into the 2026 F1 season, ranging from driver lineup changes to Red Bull betting on bringing engine manufacturing in-house for the first time in its history, as part of the Ford partnership deal. But this has long been clear to all concerned.
“I agree with Laurent (Mekies, Red Bull team principal) in the characterization (that) this is a Himalayan kind of mountain to climb,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Athletic.
“We’re competing with Ferrari, Mercedes. These people have been building PUs (power units — engines) for decades, and we have been out of the sport for a long time. And even our cross-town rivals (Cadillac) are running a Ferrari engine because the regulations changed.”
It may be a massive regulation change for F1, but Farley said Ford felt this was the right time for the company to return to a championship it left in 2004 when it sold the Jaguar team to Red Bull.
As Farley put it, “This is one of the most difficult challenges the company’s faced from a tech development standpoint. But it was worth trying.”
How the new alliance works
Ben Hodgkinson, technical director of Red Bull Ford Powertrains, began working on this project over three-and-a-half years ago. A lot more had to be done than just building an engine.
He said Red Bull had to “build three factories, recruit about 700 people, and develop a power unit to the new regulations.” They’re now onto the sixth generation of the new engine’s development, which Hodgkinson said will be “what we’ll take racing.”
Ford wasn’t yet involved when Hodgkinson began, he said, but he took the American manufacturer wanting to be part of the project “as a real vote of confidence in where we’d got to. Because they could see what we’d done in not much more than 12 months, and wanted to be part of it”.
The auto giant’s involvement has included helping Red Bull with staffing and providing additional manufacturing capability. On the personnel side, Hodgkinson had a small period of time to find experienced F1-engine-building experts, as the project needed as much time as possible to be ready for the 2026 season. He said Ford helped with filling staffing holes.
Several Ford team members work on-site at Red Bull’s F1 engine factory in Milton Keynes, England. And as for the manufacturing capabilities, Hodgkinson said, “Their direct metal laser sintering, particularly, is something they’ve helped me out with.
“It replaces castings, effectively, and allows me to turn parts around much quicker than if I used traditional suppliers.”
Ford and Red Bull took over Michigan Central Station in Detroit for their 2026 F1 season launch event (Red Bull Content Pool)
One of the reasons why Ford wanted to embark on this new journey with Red Bull specifically is because the latter is “very much incredibly independent-minded” and strayed from the traditional profile of an F1 team, Farley said. He added, “We really liked the character of the team and their winning mentality.”
Ford isn’t a stranger to F1. It is still the third-winningest engine manufacturer in the sport, trailing only Ferrari and Mercedes.
The American company is returning now for two big reasons: F1’s popularity boom in the United States and the technology challenge of the 2026 rules — particularly areas, such as software and aerodynamics, that could help its road-car production.
Ford unveiled the F150 Lightning truck in May 2021, with its launch to customers coming a year later. Farley said Ford realized aerodynamics would become even more important in car manufacturing compared to the past two decades, and F1 is known for its aero knowledge.
He added, “We thought Formula One had the best aerodynamicists, and they were very advanced with predictive-failure components and software controls of hybrid systems, and that could really help us with our road vehicles.”
The road-car market has shifted, too, with hybrid systems becoming more important, and F1 engines have been hybrid units since 2014.
The idea for the new 2026 engines is to split how they produce their power more evenly, with half now coming from the car’s electrical system. The previous engines produced around 20 percent of their power from the electric systems.
As it first looked at the designs required for the new engines, Red Bull decided to bring production in-house. Mekies described the project as “high-risk, high-gain”, but Red Bull feels the benefit of having Ford on board. “We went into it without any preset format about what to expect. We are discovering every day where they can bring inputs,” Mekies said.
But there’s a commercial element as well. Mekies said, “Ford is everywhere. They connect extremely well with a lot of our partners. It is what we do. (We) try to recruit the best possible people and the best at what they do in their business. And that’s what we have with Ford.”
Revamping the driver line-ups too
The engines and the car shapes aren’t the only things changing for Red Bull and Racing Bulls in 2026. Isack Hadjar was promoted from Racing Bulls to Red Bull, which opened the door for a rookie to join the grid: Arvid Lindblad.
The 18-year-old spent a single season racing in Formula Three in 2024, before making the step up to Formula Two last season. Come the Australian Grand Prix season opener in March, he’ll be the third-youngest F1 driver ever.
Going from F2 to F1 alone is a big jump. When the new regulations are added to the equation, Lindblad will face a steep learning curve. When The Athletic asked Lindblad what his expectations were for himself this year, he replied: “It’s hard to really answer that now because I haven’t even driven the car yet.
“At the moment, I’m just focused on preparing as best I can with the team. But I think the main thing is just focusing on myself and trying to do the best I can every weekend.”
Meanwhile, Hadjar faces a big challenge of his own in moving to Red Bull. The poor results of whoever was Max Verstappen’s teammate have been a big F1 talking point for years, with driver changes being made quickly as a result.
Early in 2025, Liam Lawson was demoted to back Racing Bulls after just two races, when he had come into the year in a similar position to Hadjar. But with new regulations shaking up the game, Hadjar feels “starting from scratch is definitely going to be helpful for me as a new guy in the team. I think it’s the right time to change teams”.
Given Lawson’s replacement — Yuki Tsunoda – also performed poorly alongside Verstappen and was himself dropped at the end of the season, Mekies did own that “we are well aware that we didn’t do a good enough job in the second car in the last few years with Red Bull, and that includes the second part of the year last year. It’s something we want to improve. It’s something we are reviewing, 360 degrees.”
Management and drivers from the Red Bull and Racing Bulls teams gather onstage during their season launch with Ford in Detroit (Red Bull Content Pool)
But with how large the regulation changes are, it does provide an opportunity for Hadjar, given that the new cars will feel very different for their drivers.
“In many respects, coming into the year of a big reset, (there’s a) reset for the car balance, reset for what the driving style needs, reset for where the pocket of performance of the car is when it’s out there on track,” said Mekies. “I think it’s a very good opportunity for him.”
Four-time F1 world champion Verstappen also has a big opportunity in front of him with this regulations change, given that the best drivers should boost their teams even more than normal this year. The expectation is that the drivers will have more say in 2026, Mekies said, “because we don’t know where to develop the cars in these massive regulations to make them as fast as possible. Drivers will have an increased input”.
Lawson feels the biggest difference could be how drivers manage the electrical energy levels of the new engines, while Hadjar anticipates reliability issues will be an increased factor for some teams and that cars will break down more often than they have in recent seasons.
“It’s always been the case with new technologies, new engines,” Hadjar said. “Testing your engine on the bench is different from the real thing.”
Additional reporting by Luke Smith.
