Red Bull and Racing Bulls have revealed the new liveries for their 2026 Formula 1 cars at an event held in the USA at Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, a building which has been restored by Ford as a home for innovation and future mobility. With Detroit being Ford’s home city, it was certainly a fitting location as the Red Bull Ford Powertrains joint venture gains momentum ahead of the new season, with the American automotive giant having replaced Honda as Red Bull’s power unit partner.

The various personnel present in Detroit included Red Bull drivers, Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar, plus team principal Laurent Mekies, with Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson, Arvid Lindblad and Alan Permane also sharing their thoughts. Thursday’s proceedings began at 10pm local time, so 3am Friday here in the UK. As you may have gathered over the years from my role as the P.ublished Group’s Formula 1 Correspondent, I’m still passionate about all things F1 as I enter my 29th season of reporting, but watching the uncovering of some new paint schemes and listening to a few appropriate words live at such an early hour was very much a step too far when I knew I could quickly catch up a few hours later via a flurry of inbound press releases from Red Bull!

The latter emphasised that the event was a launch of liveries and not one revealing the actual new cars, with the new Red Bull RB22 having an attractive and mainly blue colour scheme, including a lighter blue jacquard pattern, and after years of matte paint finishes, this time round it will be glossy. Meanwhile, Racing Bulls has tweaked the stylish livery it introduced last year, with blue and black elements on a white background.



The new cars will follow later as teams continue to fine-tune the details of their new chargers and seek not to give anything away any sooner than absolutely necessary. If you have come up with a very clever interpretation of certain aspects of the new regulations, the last thing you want to do is to share any details about it with all your rivals, and certainly not with the start of the season still some time away. In Detroit the technical director of Red Bull Ford Powertrains, Ben Hodgkinson, asserted that the compression ratio of the petrol engine within their new power unit is legal, referring to comments from several other teams as simply “ a lot of noise about nothing.” He added that they had pushed the regulations to the limit, but of course that is only what you would expect at the pinnacle of world motorsport.

On this theme, there’s been an unprecedented warning from the FIA governing body that the opening Grand Prix of the 2026 season in Melbourne, Australia, on 8 March may reveal noticeable differences in performance from the 11 teams as they reveal their new cars in race conditions for the first time. It will quickly become apparent which outfits have best implemented the wide-ranging new active aerodynamic, power unit, chassis and fuel regulations for 2026 onwards, which represent the most significant set of changes in the 75-year history of Formula 1.

With the new challengers having been designed amidst great secrecy and with each team having little, if any, knowledge of what their opponents have been developing, there’s always a risk that you might think ahead of testing that your 2026 offering is really quick before you soon realise it isn’t, and vice versa, of course.

Looking at the bigger picture, the cars are initially expected to be up to two seconds a lap slower than their 2025 counterparts, but in-season development should reduce this, and the key hope is that the drivers will be able to race closer together in cleaner air than during the preceding ground-effect era from 2022 onwards.