Zak Brown: "Foolish" to discount Red Bull despite poor start to F1 2026

“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.”

Zak Brown, McLaren

Zak Brown, McLaren

Red Bull has suffered quite the decline since its domination of the 2023 season when it won 21 of 22 grands prix, breaking records like the most wins and points (860) in a campaign.

But then it was outdeveloped by its rivals as the ground-effect era progressed, while Red Bull also underwent a huge transformation of personnel as many were poached by other teams.

McLaren signed Rob Marshall and Will Courtenay with Gianpiero Lambiase also set to join, Jonathan Wheatley headed to Sauber (now Audi), while Adrian Newey left for Aston Martin.

Laurent Mekies also replaced Christian Horner as team principal midway through 2025, which was also Helmut Marko’s final year at the organisation, meaning it is quite the transformation.

So speaking about what Red Bull needs to do, particularly with it being the first year of the team developing in-house power units, Brown said: “They have to kind of do a little bit of a reset. They lost a lot of people: Christian, Wheatley, GP [Lambiase] eventually, Newey.

“So much what I came into, which was a different situation because they were very competitive, but the majority of the pitwall's changed.

"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.”

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