Formula 1 heads to next week's Austrian Grand Prix with a row brewing over the sport's new engine catch-up mechanism — and, unusually, the team it favours least is the one being told it has the best power unit.
Under the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) system, the FIA has ranked the 2026 internal combustion engines in the order Red Bull, Mercedes, Ferrari, Audi and Honda. Only the combustion side is measured; the electrical component, which makes up close to half of a modern power unit's output, is excluded. Red Bull, building its own engine for the first time in partnership with Ford, was judged the benchmark and so receives no upgrade tokens. Mercedes, ruled more than two percent adrift, gets one in-season upgrade. Ferrari, Audi and Honda, more than four percent behind, get two each.
The verdict landed awkwardly. Mercedes have won six of the season's seven races, yet it is Red Bull that has been handed the "best engine" label and the development handcuffs that come with it. Max Verstappen said at Barcelona he was "surprised" to learn his team topped the ranking.
Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies was careful to separate the principle from the result. "We are completely with the fact that the rule states that you should only try to estimate the pecking order of the ICE power," he told Sky Sports F1. "We are completely okay with that; we have all agreed to that, and we don't think that is the issue. Where we certainly would like to have a deeper conversation is because we do not see one single data sample that indicates that we would have an advantage over our friends at Mercedes."
Mekies said the team had "opened a very good dialogue" with the FIA and questioned how reliably engine power can be read at all. "It's actually a very difficult measurement to make. We have one sensor in the car that tries to measure that, that has a number of limitations," he said.
Toto Wolff, the obvious beneficiary, takes the opposite view — that the numbers are simply the numbers. "It's data that they have measured and collected," the Mercedes boss told Sky. "There's no political background, there is no favours, but it's the outcome of their analysis of their torque sensors and the way it's being done, and that is the result."
Where Wolff draws a hard line is on any move toward a Balance of Performance, the equalisation tool used in sportscar racing. "I get a rash of allergy when talking about BoP," he said. "This is something that we should stay far away from Formula 1. It's a political mess in all the other series. It makes manufacturers go out of the sport, also, and I've been very close to that, as you can imagine, in DTM, in GTs, in Le Mans."
He framed ADUO instead as a safeguard against the kind of runaway era Mercedes themselves enjoyed a decade ago, winning 51 of 59 races from 2014 to 2016. "It was [intended to be] a protection mechanism to avoid the 2014 situation," he said. "We were on the good end of that."
Not everyone wants to leave the system untouched. Audi CEO Mattia Binotto suggested F1 could tie engine development to championship position, mirroring the sliding scale already used for aerodynamic testing. "If you are behind in the standings, you've got more opportunity in wind tunnel timing, etcetera, and that's a way for teams somehow to converge," he said.
The FIA has yet to formally confirm the rankings and is still consulting manufacturers, with two further reviews due after the Hungarian and Mexico City rounds that will shape the 2027 pecking order. For now, the paddock agrees on only one thing: measuring an engine is far harder than arguing about one.
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*Originally published on [Formula 1 News](https://newsformula.one/article/red-bull-disputes-its-own-best-engine-verdict-in-f1-aduo-row). Visit for full coverage.*