McLaren CEO Zak Brown has warned against writing off Red Bull Racing despite the team’s difficult start to the 2026 Formula 1 season, predicting that the competitive order will tighten as teams converge on the new regulations.
Red Bull sits sixth in the constructors’ standings with just 16 points after three rounds — a dramatic fall from the team that dominated 2022 and 2023. Max Verstappen has yet to score a podium this year, and his frustration has been evident as the team struggles with both the new chassis regulations and its first year developing in-house power units.
McLaren Boss Expects Field to Converge
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix, Brown drew parallels to McLaren’s own resurgence during the current ground-effect era. His team struggled in 2022 before climbing to win the 2024 and 2025 titles — proof that early-season form doesn’t define a campaign.
It would be very foolish to write Red Bull off, I also think Audi’s done a very good job. So I think it would be foolish to not think the other teams are going to move up the grid quickly. Things are only going to consolidate over time, not widen. We see how quickly the sport can change and how people quickly can get competitive and then sometimes not.
McLaren currently sits third in the standings, 30 points ahead of Red Bull and 44 clear of eighth-placed Audi. But Brown expects the gaps to narrow as teams bring upgrades — many arriving in Miami this weekend — and better understand the new technical regulations.
The 2026 rules overhaul has widened the field significantly. At the 2025 Australian Grand Prix, the grid was separated by 1.235 seconds in Q1. This year, that gap has ballooned to 3.737 seconds — a spread that typically compresses as development cycles progress.
Red Bull’s Personnel Exodus and Reset
Red Bull’s decline follows a massive transformation in personnel. McLaren signed technical director Rob Marshall and strategy chief Will Courtenay, while race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase is set to join the Woking team. Jonathan Wheatley departed to lead Audi’s F1 project, and Adrian Newey left for Aston Martin.
Most significantly, Laurent Mekies replaced Christian Horner as team principal midway through 2025 — Helmut Marko’s final year with the organisation. The result is a near-total overhaul of Red Bull’s senior leadership during a critical regulation change.
Brown, who led McLaren through its own rebuild, expressed confidence in Mekies’ ability to steady the ship.
They have to kind of do a little bit of a reset. They lost a lot of people: Christian, Wheatley, GP eventually, Newey. I rate Laurent, I think he does a very good job. He’s technical, he’s young and he’s got to rebuild the people that he lost and rebuild the team. I have no doubt he will, and much like McLaren had an immense amount of talent that just needed to be unlocked, I think that’s probably the same as Red Bull. They’ve been very dominant up to not very long ago, so there’s a lot of talent in there and I think he’ll just need to get it redirected.
From Record-Breaking to Rebuilding
Red Bull’s fall is particularly stark given its recent dominance. In 2023, the team won 21 of 22 grands prix and set records for most wins and points in a season (860). But rivals out-developed Red Bull as the ground-effect era matured, and the personnel losses compounded the challenge of adapting to 2026’s new regulations.
The Miami Grand Prix offers both redemption and pressure. Verstappen will be hunting his first podium of the season, while Mekies and his reshuffled technical team face growing scrutiny. Brown’s warning, though, is clear: count Red Bull out at your peril. The team that dominated so recently still has the infrastructure and talent to fight back — it just needs time to unlock it under new leadership.