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Championship position: 5th (66 points) The team’s identity and name may still be uninspiring, but Racing Bulls have been one of the revelations of the season in the mid-pack. The team has increasingly been relocating to Red Bull’s campus at Milton Keynes, and experienced personnel such as Team Principal Alan Permane and Chief Technical Officer Tim Goss are running a tidy ship. The VCARB-03 has retained the compliant handling characteristics that defined its predecessor—despite the overhaul of regulations—and the team has developed strongly. Racing Bulls brought a new package to the Canadian Grand Prix, and it dragged the team clear of the midfield with five double points finishes from the last six grands prix and top 10 positions in qualifying now an expectation rather than the outlier. It makes fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship—which would be the team’s highest-ever result—a very realistic proposition, having claimed the position from Alpine in Hungary by a five-point margin. “We started a little bit late on the 2026 car,” Permane explained. “We knew the first races were going to be a bit of a struggle. Certainly, testing was definitely a struggle. We brought a very large upgrade for Melbourne, and we’ve continued to upgrade the car through the season. I think what really switched the car on was the floor we brought to Montreal, and that really did light the car up. “The second part of what’s really helped our season is finding the race pace. We had a very nice car in Canada in qualifying, but it wasn’t so good in the race. Monaco was very similar, Barcelona very similar. What we’ve done since Austria, is that we’ve fixed that.” That means Racing Bulls’ surge to the front of the mid-pack has been “a combination of what has been delivered from the wind tunnel, design and production, and a little bit of the way the guys are running the car at the track.” Reliability has also been a strong weapon for Racing Bulls, facilitated by the surprising strength of the Red Bull Powertrains-Ford power unit. There have been only two failures to finish, with Liam Lawson’s car entering anti-stall in Miami, facilitating his accident into the side of Pierre Gasly’s Alpine, while Arvid Lindblad’s standout display in Canada was truncated by a pre-race gearbox failure. Lawson and Lindblad have operated at a consistently high level through the season. Finally provided with stability, after part-seasons in 2023 and 2024, and the aborted Red Bull promotion of early 2025, Lawson has been able to knuckle down and convert potential into results. “I think that comes as well just with more experience,” Lawson said of a stronger all-round performance. “The more races you do, compared to how I was when I came to Formula 1, naturally you learn and you get better. I’ve been very focused on trying to extract everything out of my own performance as well, so on that side I feel very good.” Lindblad served notice of his ability from the very first lap of his career, briefly running in third spot while battling champions, to score on his debut. A more difficult run followed, as he tackled new circuits, but he rebounded excellently with superb display in Canada—until his race prospects were wrecked by a pre-race gearbox failure—since when he has scored in every grand prix. Lindblad graduated from Formula 3 to Formula 2 to Formula 1 in successive years, and was parachuted into Racing Bulls aged just 18, but has never looked out of place in the top echelon. It has been a promising first half for Racing Bulls and, given the strength of the VCARB-03 since Canada, there is every reason to believe it can pull away from the midfield and consolidate fifth spot. U.K.-based Phillip Horton started covering Grands Prix while still at university and swiftly deemed that writing about Formula 1 and the behind-the-scenes machinations was much more engaging than reading centuries-old novels. Degree gained, he went on to cover the sport full-time from 2014 and is as intrigued and excited by the destinations Formula 1 visits during its lengthy annual world tour as the racing itself. Phillip joined Autoweek in 2021 and while he has just about learned to spell in American English he has yet to find anywhere in America that makes a proper cup of tea.