How the Red Bull-Ford partnership will work
In 2021, Red Bull found itself potentially facing a lack of powertrain for its main squad and junior team (then Alpha Tauri, now Racing Bulls) when supplier Honda announced it was quitting the sport.
The solution was bold: to use some of its vast fizzy drink-fuelled wealth to set up its own engine division, Red Bull Powertrains, complete with a sprawling new factory in Milton Keynes.
The move had short-term benefits but a long-term view: it was always focused on 2026, when new F1 engine regulations would come into force.
Although power would continue to be supplied by 1.6-litre V6 combustion engines, the hybrid element would be revamped, the two small systems on the old unit replaced by a large 469bhp e-motor powered purely by kinetic energy. Electric energy would provide half the power unit’s total energy output.
A bold plan? Try audacious. But then Red Bull’s success in F1 – 130 race wins and seven drivers’ titles in 21 seasons – has instilled what Phil Prew, the powertrain firm’s technical operations chief, calls a “winning mindset that set the scene to take on the ultimate challenge”.
If Prew’s name sounds familiar, he was Lewis Hamilton’s race engineer at McLaren for the Briton’s maiden F1 drivers’ title in 2008 and more recently spent 10 years working at Mercedes-AMG’s powertrain division in Brixworth.
He will find plenty of his former colleagues among Red Bull’s 700 engine staff, including technical director Ben Hodgkinson.
Ford joined the project in 2023, so you might think the firm’s involvement is a branding exercise. But Christian Hertrich, Ford Racing’s powertrain chief engineer, insists this is “not a sticker exercise for us”. That said, it’s all relative.
Hertrich acknowledges that Ford is producing only “a percentage” of the power unit, citing 12 key components spread across various elements. While Ford staff are rotated to Milton Keynes to work at Red Bull Ford Powertrains, they number in single digits at any time – a tiny fraction of the overall workforce.