Red Bull's difficult start and 1976 cars compared with 2026 - F1 Q&A
Formula 1's unscheduled fallow April is nearing its end, with the 2026 season resuming with the Miami Grand Prix, from 1-3 May. While we wait for the action to restart, BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions. Before the season, people were saying Red Bull were in the mix with the top teams and that their new engine was in good shape.
But they've basically been nowhere. Where do their problems lie, and why were people so wrong about their potential? - Sean Red Bull have had a very difficult start to the season.
It started off looking not too bad, with Isack Hadjar qualifying third at the first race of the season, even though Max Verstappen crashed in qualifying. Hadjar retired from the race in Melbourne with an engine problem, while Verstappen recovered reasonably well to sixth place in the race. Team principal Laurent Mekies said after the race in Japan: "We left Melbourne thinking that we were one second off Mercedes and half a second off Ferrari.
In terms of overall gap to competitors, (here) it looked not too dissimilar to the Melbourne picture in terms of one second to the best guy, half a second to the best Ferrari. " Mekies pointed out that in Australia Verstappen's recovery brought him up to the back of Lando Norris' McLaren but that by Japan Red Bull were a "distant force". In other words, McLaren had progressed and Red Bull had not.
Mekies said that in China Red Bull were "starting to scratch (our) heads about car balance and car characteristics". He perceives their problem as "some work to do" to close the gap on the competition and "a layer of us not being able to extract enough from the package and to give something Max can push with". The car does not handle with the front-end bite that Verstappen prefers, and which enables him to get the best out of himself.