Carlos Sainz backs Toto Wolff: Red Bull Powertrains setting F1 2026 benchmark

Carlos Sainz is another voice to claim that Red Bull Powertrains may be the engine to beat to start the F1 2026 season.

The Spaniard got his pre-season underway in earnest on Wednesday as Williams began its testing programme, giving him the chance to check out some of the competition on track.

Carlos Sainz: Red Bull Powertrains a clear step ahead

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With the new power unit regulations likely to introduce a major performance differentiator across the teams based on any given team’s understanding of its new equipment and how best to manage energy harvesting and management, the topic of who has the best power unit is one on everyone’s minds as the first pre-season test in Bahrain starts to offer some insight.

On Wednesday, Mercedes’ Toto Wolff pointed in the opposite direction from what paddock chatter had suggested during the Barcelona shakedown, saying he believes Red Bull Powertrains is setting the benchmark for the rest of the field.

Red Bull has become a manufacturer in its own right this year, with former team boss and CEO Christian Horner pushing for the Milton Keynes-based organisation to establish its own department, Red Bull Powertrains [RBPT] following Honda’s withdrawal from the sport at the end of 2021.

While Horner exited the company six months ago in the final stages of the company’s preparations to enter F1, RBPT’s programme has continued unabated, with Horner’s successor Laurent Mekies slotting into his position.

RBPT has had a strong start to testing, with both Red Bull and Racing Bulls having strong shakedowns in Barcelona, particularly as the engine in the back of the RB22 powered Isack Hadjar to the fastest time during his 100+ laps of running on the very first day.

The performance has continued to impress as the first official pre-season test has begun, and Max Verstappen set the second-fastest time of the opening day as he put in 136 laps to accumulate 736 kilometres of valuable data.

Following on from Wolff declaring RBPT and Red Bull as the benchmark, Carlos Sainz shared similar views after his first day behind the wheel of his Williams.

“It’s still extremely early days but, if I would have to judge by the GPS data of yesterday, right now, it is true that whatever Red Bull Powertrains/Ford were doing yesterday was a clear step ahead of anyone else,” he said, when asked about what he’d seen of the RBPT performance.

“A clear step, not only a small step, but a clear step.

“It was mighty impressive if they managed to turn up to race one of a completely new set of regulations, with a completely new engine, new people, and turn up to be the most fastest and reliable engine.

“You have to take your hat off to them and say what they’ve come up with, what they were showing yesterday, was very, very impressive.”

A key area that Sainz believes Red Bull has succeeded is in ensuring that drivers are able to drive naturally while optimising energy harvesting, allowing them to keep up the pace without compromising corner dynamics in favour of a net energy gain.

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This would tie in with Wolff’s comments that Red Bull appears to have more energy left to deploy down the straights than its rivals, deploying for a greater percentage of the length of the straight before having to lift and coast.

“So far from what I could see yesterday, it seems like Red Bull have done exactly that without having to give the driver a compromise,” he said.

“They can just give them ‘this is how you drive and this is how you want to drive – I’m going to allow you to do what you want with the recovery that I want.

“The future of these regulations, if I have to look ahead two or three years from now, I think it’s going to be integrating the two and not having to give the choice to the driver, or having to tell the driver to adapt, and integrating both in the same package.

“That’s what we ended up doing with the previous set of regulations.

“Even though now it’s extremely early days, and it’s normal that both things are a bit separate, for me the future, you would not be allowed to have a choice. I need to make it happen.”

Sainz and Wolff’s comments came on the same day that Wolff conceded that Mercedes has no plans to fight back should a supermajority vote of the Power Unit Advisory Committee rule in favour of a late rule change that would close off a grey area related to compression ratios, which Mercedes is believed to have been exploiting on its engines.

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