Verstappen won at Marina Bay this past weekend. It was the last circuit on the calendar — other than the Madring — where he had never won. And now he has.
Nine starts there, four podiums, second place in each of the last two years, and he had never got the top step. He got it in the year everybody expected Red Bull to be nowhere. It was also his second win in a row. He won at Sepang the weekend before, which was Red Bull’s first win of the season. They have now taken the last two races on the calendar.
This is Red Bull’s first year building their own power unit, as Red Bull Ford Powertrains. Before this, they bought engines. Laurent Mekies has said plainly where they started: 1.2 seconds off the pace in Australia, part chassis and part power unit. The pit lane consensus early on was that Mercedes had the best power unit, and Mercedes lead the constructors by 134 points.
Then the FIA published its engine numbers, and they said something else.
The rule is called ADUO — Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities. The FIA tracks every manufacturer on a performance index for the internal combustion engine. Not the whole power unit. Just the combustion half. Two to four percent behind the best one and you get one extra upgrade to homologated hardware this season and one next, plus cost cap relief. Four percent or more and you get two and two.
After the first review, following the Canadian Grand Prix, Mercedes landed in the two to four percent window. Ferrari, Honda and Audi were all four percent or worse. All four got upgrades.
Red Bull got nothing. Their engine was never far enough behind to qualify.
In their first year of ever building one, the team that had always bought its engines was the only team on the grid the FIA decided did not need help with it.
That does not settle it, because ADUO only measures the combustion half, and the 2026 power unit is close to fifty-fifty with the electrical side. Mercedes can have the best power unit overall and still be a few percent down on the part being measured. But Toto Wolff called Red Bull the benchmark for energy deployment back at the Bahrain test, before any of this, and nobody paid much attention, because the car was more than a second off.
So the deficit was never really the engine. It was everything around it.
The hardware was frozen, so the gains had to come from somewhere else, and Mekies is careful about how he describes it. He talks about integration rather than peak power — there is a lot more to the business, he says, than peak power or peak downforce. He has confirmed the Baku package was most probably their last significant upgrade of 2026, because most of the resources have already moved to next year’s car. There was no single moment.
He still will not claim parity. He says he does not know whether Malaysia was genuine or a product of extreme heat and a rough surface pushing other cars out of their operating windows. And the speed trap data is strange. In Sepang qualifying, Verstappen was second across the finish line at 284.8 kilometres an hour, and eighteenth on the main trap at 310.7. Bottas topped that one at 329.5. This is not a car that is fast in a straight line.
Mekies also still argues in public that Red Bull do not have the best engine and should be allowed to upgrade it, and the team contests the ADUO ruling. But he said the thing that gives it away: he would rather have a strong engine and no ADUO than a weak engine and the relief.
It is also only one car. Hadjar never got near Verstappen in Singapore. Red Bull are fourth in the constructors on 332, behind Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren. The car is quick in one pair of hands.
Verstappen came into Singapore fifth in the championship, one point behind Leclerc. He left fourth, and seventeen points off second, with six races to go. He is not winning the title — Antonelli is 119 points ahead with 150 left, so the arithmetic technically survives and nothing else does.
But a team that started the season 1.2 seconds off the pace, in their first year as an engine manufacturer, has won the last two races and is arguably the fastest car on the grid heading into the final six. That matters a great deal more for 2027 than it does for this year.