The FIA has handed Red Bull the top spot in Formula 1’s new ADUO engine ranking, a ruling that opens upgrade paths for Mercedes and Ferrari in 2026 and gives Lewis Hamilton’s future team a clearer development route before the season even begins.
Manufacturers were told on Monaco Grand Prix race day that the first ADUO judgment had been made after the recent Canadian Grand Prix, with Red Bull’s Ford-branded Red Bull Powertrains unit classified as the benchmark and Mercedes and Ferrari placed into the upgrade brackets. For Ferrari, that means two homologations under the system; Mercedes gets one.
The timing matters because the ADUO system is not a general performance table but a mechanism that decides who is allowed to push harder on engine development. Under the rules, a manufacturer more than 2% adrift of the benchmark can make one upgrade for 2026 and another for 2027, while a car judged 4% or more off can make two upgrades in 2026 and two more in 2027. Mercedes will also receive an extra $3 million in cost-cap room and 70 additional hours of bench testing.
Ferrari and Honda, meanwhile, were both judged to be more than 4% off, which puts them in the more generous category. That brings Ferrari two homologations, along with the possibility of $4.65 million and 100 bench hours if it sits in the 4-6% band, or larger allowances if the gap is wider. The scale rises from there, to $6.35 million and 150 hours at 6-8%, $8 million and 190 hours at 8-10%, and $11 million plus 230 hours for anything more than 10% adrift.
The awkward part is that the benchmark itself cuts against the sport’s usual pecking order. Mercedes has long been treated as the standard power unit and, in recent seasons, the championship dominator on engine reputation alone, yet under the ADUO criteria Red Bull has been classed as the best. The FIA has not laid out the exact measurement formula in the regulations, saying only that the system is tied to the internal combustion engine, while energy harvesting, deployment, efficiency and more advanced energy management sit outside the qualifying tests. That lack of detail leaves teams knowing the outcome but not the full scoreboard behind it.
What comes next is straightforward and unfinished at the same time: two more ADUO assessment points remain in 2026, and those sessions will decide whether these first brackets hold or shift. For Ferrari, the ruling is already useful news. For Hamilton, who is tied to Ferrari in this story, it means the team he is linked to will go into the new engine era with extra room to chase Red Bull and a clearer sense of where it stands today.
