After 22 years, Ford returns to the F1 grid to join team Red Bull
We go inside Ford HQ to look under the hood
By 
My phone says “feels like -21 degrees” – a tidy 60 degrees cooler than the day I left Australia. We’re in Detroit, Michigan. It’s snowing. The roads are full of snow ploughs, and the local midwesterners are politely apologising for the weather.
Despite the chill factor, the hottest season launch on the Formula 1 calendar is about to go down inside the grand Michigan Central Station, which is lit up in Ford blue, and, thanks to the family of the hosting car manufacturer, has been restored from a ruin into a multi-billion-dollar venue and tech and mobility hub. The event? Ford Racing’s illustrious return to Formula 1 and the Red Bull teams’ season launch.
More than 1000 media, fans, insiders and more have descended on Motor City to witness the unveiling of the two F1 cars, meet the team and get the inside scoop, including Red Bull drivers Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar; Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson and rookie Arvid Lindblad; Daniel Ricciardo, in his new role as Ford Racing Global Ambassador; the freshly announced drivers for Ford’s 2027 return to the World Endurance Racing Championship at Le Mans, Sebastian Priaulx, Mike Rockenfeller and former F1 driver Logan Sargeant; racing driver and actor Frankie Muniz; Dax Shepherd as host and Big Sean bringing the tunes. All this is an appetiser for what is shaping up to be the hottest and most unpredictable season in F1 in modern history.
A new playing field
The 2026 season will see the biggest regulation change in F1 since the introduction of hybrid systems in 2014. Almost every aspect of the cars will change, including chassis, control electronics, tyres, fuel, aerodynamics and power, and it’s the first time in F1 history that both the chassis and engine rules have been changed at the same time.
The changes have been implemented to ensure F1 stays ahead of the curve across automotive, tech and the wider mobility industries, keeps its relevance as the pinnacle of motorsport and looks to become more sustainable. So when the cars hit the track at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne this month, they will be shorter, lighter and more nimble, their aerodynamics will be different, they’ll be using advanced sustainable fuels and the new power unit will see a rebalance of power that will see a near 50-50 split between electric and internal combustion (petrol) power – a major leap from the 20 per cent of electric power applicable to the previous generation.
On the ground in Detroit, Verstappen voiced some predictions to us about what we could expect, particularly when it came to reliability throughout the race weekend. But there will be several factors that will determine success – from the newly developed fuels (and not all teams use the same fuel supplier) to the tyres and, importantly, the drivers’ skills. The aerodynamics are different, which changes the load, the balance, the wings and how the cars are being set up for different tracks. There’s way less downforce than previous years, so the drivers have to rely more on the mechanical grip from the tyres and wheels, which are also smaller this year. To say it’ll take some getting used to for the drivers and their teams is an understatement.
The cars have shrunk in size, so they should be sharper and easier to manoeuvre into the turns; that 50-50 ICE-to-electric split will provide more immediate power and could result in cars squirrelling and shifting out of corners. While we’ve had hybrid cars before, the greater emphasis on electrical power will affect how drivers decide to deploy their boost, overtaking and override modes, so we can expect more variability lap to lap, on the straights, in the breaking zones and some very interesting qualifying sessions.
The result of all this is that the pressure is not only on teams to get their power units, chassis and aero setups correct (not to mention their race-weekend strategy), but now drivers are having to figure out how to get the most out of their machines mid-fight. With all this learning on the table and a heightened need for engineering know-how, there’s never been a better time for a new technical partner to enter (or re-enter) Formula 1.
What Ford brings to the grid
It’s been more than 20 years since we last saw the blue oval on the F1 grid – and 125 years since Henry Ford created a race car that would set the tone of his enterprise and secure the investment that allowed the Ford Motor Company to exist and thrive. Then came the rest: from the famous 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans, where they beat Ferrari, to all the motorsport in which the marque has since seen success, including V8 Supercars, World Rally Championships, NASCAR, F1 and more.
So, to say that Ford has unfinished business in the pinnacle of motorsport is putting it mildly. But this isn’t just a case of slapping a logo on a race car. The stakes this year are incredibly high, and the technical needs are great. After Ford announced, in February 2023, that it would come on as a five-year technical partner with Red Bull Racing, it set up a powertrains facility in Red Bull’s HQ in Milton Keynes, UK, bringing together the chassis and the powertrain teams in one place for the first time.
“It changes how we think about the car,” explains Red Bull powertrains’ technical operations director Philip Prew. “It gives us a great opportunity around how you optimise all of these different aspects. The mechanical, electrical and digital disciplines are more interdependent than than ever. All of it has to work together. That’s where we’re going to derive the lap time on the circuit.”
Over the last few years, the team had been tasked to create a power unit from the ground up – a hugely complex process. “We really had a blank sheet. We had absolutely nothing,” says Prew. “We had no infrastructure. We had no factory. We had no team – and certainly we had no design. We literally had to build every single component from scratch. So, that was a daunting prospect, but also an opportunity. From that decision, we built a factory, we built a team, and, indeed, we built an engine.”
Red Bull itself, with six Constructors’ Championships and eight Drivers’ Championships under its belt, showed up to the table with a winning mentality and an appetite for doing things differently. But that doesn’t mean history will repeat itself. “Even with the pedigree we speak about, it was a huge leap,” Prew adds. “It meant creating a completely new capability, facilities – despite Red Bull’s existing success on track.”
Still, for Ford, the partnership opens doors to stake their claim in F1. “We found a partner who’s successful, who’s single-minded, who’s driven, and it allows us to bring what we’re good at to the table,” says Ford Racing’s powertrain chief engineer, Christian Hertrich. “And what we’re good at is manufacturing. [After] decades of process engineering, we can contribute . . . [we can] fill some holes that they had.”
So, the fit was immediate. “Everybody thinks that Red Bull is just go, go, go, go, go forward,” says Hertrich. “[Ford] is a big, slow machine. Right? Everybody’s seen Ford v Ferrari – that’s the mindset. But because we’re a big, giant behemoth and we’re slow, we have processes, we have quality standards, we have things that we can help them with while they are really pushing us and making us speed up our ways. We have completely different mindsets, but the same goal of winning.”
With plants all over the world making millions of cars every year, Ford brings advanced manufacturing to the race that few others can match, particularly 3D printing, of which Ford was an early adopter 20 years ago. “We’ve had time to perfect it, and we have a lot of different machines, so what that does is, it allows a lot of rapid iteration. You have to try lots of different things, and by increasing the speed at which we manufacture, we can do that iteration, making sure we’re optimising absolutely everything. We’re not waiting to machine parts. We’re not waiting to tool parts. We can just print them.”
For example, where the average time to print a prototype part has been 16 days – critical days that can make or break a season – Ford says it can slash that to five days. “As newcomers to the 2026 regulations, we are fighting a decades-long experience gap against established manufacturers. We cannot afford to wait for traditional simulations to crunch numbers,” says Hertrich.
Being the giant OEM it is, Ford also brings things like engine modelling, computing power (including faster-than-real-time AI machine learning), vast amounts of simulation knowledge, software development, testing experience, electrification know-how and, of course, a slew of engineers who have worked in motorsport for decades. And all this still has to be managed under the F1 cost cap, which is a challenge in itself across the board this year.
F1’s Trickle-down effect
F1 is the ultimate test bed for automotive manufacturers and, as such, has always been on the cutting edge of technology. Many elements we now take for granted in our cars have originated in the sport. This includes carbon-fibre tech to hybrid systems, mechanical fuel injection, dual-clutch transmissions, paddle shifters and seatbelt technology, but extends to things in our daily lives, including helping make 5G accessible, heart surgery more efficient and air-traffic control systems more accurate. These days, it’s also an appealing lab for brand marketing, as F1 has one of the fastest-growing and most highly engaged fanbases of any global sport.
This is especially tempting for a historic automotive brand looking to expand its cultural relevance and reach. “It’s not limited to Formula 1,” says Ford CEO Jim Farley, who is quick to point out the knock-on effect F1 is having across a number of motorsport categories. “I was out in the Saudi desert three days ago for the Dakar Rally [held January 3-17], and there were a few older people, but the average age of the people with their feet in the dunes watching Carlos Sainz Sr. or Nani Roma drive by was about 29. So, there’s a lot of young people and really vibrant young audiences in the Middle East, in Australia and New Zealand, Thailand and around the globe. So, no, it’s not limited to Formula 1, but obviously, Formula 1 has a huge impact.”
This year, Ford will lean further into its motorsport strategy across a number of categories off-road and on, including Mustang Cup, a new one-make racing series featuring the V8-powered, track-only Mustang Dark Horse R, which is debuting in Australia.
While Ford has always had a presence in motorsport, it does feel like the OEM is in a racing renaissance of sorts, something us mere mortals will eventually get to see and feel in the cars on our roads. “We are getting a kind of renewed clarity around the brand strategy and where we’re moving forward,” Todd Willing, Ford’s head of design, tells us at Ford HQ. “[Racing] is the essence of the company, and sometimes we play it down. But we’re in this period where it’s not just about image, but it’s having a real impact on the way we go about creating our product and the kinds of products that we’re creating, and it’s really inspiring for the team.”
All this is to say that entering F1 in its most chaotic year in recent history, making the enormous investment in development and engineering, doing the work and taking on the risks, is not simply a brand play to capture the youth, but a deeply technical strategy that Ford hopes will improve its cars for the future.
“I’m going to have to be very explicit here,” Farley says, sternly. “In the past, Ford looked at motorsports as a marketing expense. That’s not what we see today. We see that by building race cars for other people and letting them race, we can build a strong business. By having racing schools and experiences, we can get people to understand the technology.
“Frankly, more important than any of that, is backcasting the technology and racing into our core products, like Raptor . . . [that’s] the magic. The magic of this is what Porsche did with its GT3 and GT2RS. We want to do that for off-road and across our whole lineup.”
The ultimate goal seems to be two-pronged: trophies and podiums for the teams; pride and the trickle-down race benefits for the rest of us. “We want people to say, ‘I’m buying a piece of that racing accomplishment,” says Farley.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see if those great accomplishments will show up in the form of Red Bull podiums. Because as things stands, this season could be anyone’s race.
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