Horner on Red Bull and Ford’s ‘biggest challenge’ with 2026 power unit

In just 46 weeks, Red Bull Racing will officially sport the Ford logo on its car, symbolic of the team’s new partnership with the American company and their jointly created power unit for the upcoming 2026 F1 season. It’s almost an entirely new car considering the modifications laid out for the power output and units specified within the FIA’s regulations. But Christian Horner, Red Bull Racing’s team principal, is confident in the progress being made for the 2026 machine — sharing some insight with Motorsport.com on the power unit development during a Ford event in Charlotte, North Carolina, shortly after the Rolex 24 at Daytona.

“The collaboration has been fantastic,” Horner said. “One of our concerns when we took on this project was that we missed the depth of knowledge compared to Ferrari or Mercedes or any other OEM-owned team. And then this partnership with Ford just naturally happened and that’s just given us such a great collaboration, so much enthusiasm across the different departments that really we’re able to go toe to toe with what our competitors have available to them.

“I think we have all the strength and depth and all the capabilities. We just don’t have the experience. Of course Ford brings some great experience with them, but this is a brand new project and we’re under no illusions that we’ve got a mountain to climb. But we’ve got some great people involved. We’ve got great partners, we’ve got a great fuel partner in ExxonMobil. We’ve got great facilities and most importantly, we’ve got great people involved.”

Where new technology = more power + less fuel

One of the largest hurdles for Ford and Red Bull Racing’s project, according to Horner, as laid out in F1’s 2026 regulations, involves the power unit specifications, which is further complicated with the requirement to utilize 100% synthetic fuels derived from sustainable sources.

Creating a more energy-dense fuel is not only going to be key to maximizing the power of the internal combustion engine that is part of the power unit but it could also potentially lower the weight of the car if less fuel is necessary for a given length of a race. Horner mentioned that fuel will be a “key performance differentiator” for the 2026 power unit. Series regulations aim to reduce the amount of fuel used by around 30%. Also outlined is a change in fuel flow, controlled via a maximum energy flow rate instead of measuring mass or volume.

On the electric side of the new power unit, the FIA requires more of the horsepower to come from electricity as the MGU-K (motor generator unit – kinetic) will increase its output from 160 horsepower to 475 horsepower. This will result in a shift of balance between the electric and combustion engines to be roughly 50/50 — compared to the current configuration where the internal combustion engine produces 80% of the power.

Another vital, and new, component for the joint power unit development is Oracle AI.“It’s a tool that is becoming ever more prevalent in Formula 1,” Horner told Motorsport.com. “Oracle is a key player in that area for us. It’s really exciting.”

AI is only a small piece of how Red Bull Powertrains is leveraging the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They’ve been able to make use of a variety of methods to simulate many of the over 6,000 components that will make up the new power unit — allowing the team to virtually assemble parts of the engine and see how they interact without producing physical components. With fuel being such a significant area of the new regulations, they are digging as deep using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate things like how fuel is shaped as it flows out of an injector nozzle in order to optimize the design of internal engine components.

It’s no secret that Red Bull Powertrains has a huge task ahead of them as they’ve built an entire operation from scratch, but bringing Ford into the fold is allowing them to leverage the expertise of an OEM that has a wide range of experience in internal combustion engines and electrification.

“The partners that we have have the best in the sport and I think that we’re very proud to have a Ford badge on the car again from 2026,” Horner said. “It will be a new era — a new chapter for the team. It’s the biggest challenge that we’ve taken on in the last 21 years since being involved in Formula 1.”