Ford and Red Bull's F1 Engine Partnership Is a Race Against Time

“Dietrich heard this engine run.” Red Bull Racing team boss Christian Horner gestures at a tiny V-6 gleaming on a podium at Red Bull’s sprawling campus near Milton Keynes, north of London. It’s a little more than two years old, this engine, and already an ancient artifact for an enterprise at which progress is measured to the thousandth of a second. It was the first running prototype of the Red Bull-Ford engine that will power the team’s F1 cars from 2026 on. And it was fired up in the presence of Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz shortly before he died in October 2022.

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It's a highly significant engine for Ford Motor Company, too. The DM-series V-6—the DM nomenclature honors Mateschitz, the Austrian entrepreneur who turned an energy drink into a multi-billion-dollar action sports franchise—marks the return of the Blue Oval to F1 for the first time in 20 years.

Ford’s first foray into F1 defined a whole era of grand prix racing. The 3.0-liter Ford-Cosworth DFV V-8, developed with Ford money by British engineering firm Cosworth in the mid-1960s was a light, powerful and durable racing engine that enabled Colin Chapman, Ken Tyrrell, and Frank Williams, and others to create racing cars that could compete—and beat—those from factory teams such as Ferrari and Renault. Cosworth-Ford DFV-powered cars won 155 grands prix between 1967 and 1983.

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Post-DFV, new Ford engines would power McLaren, Benetton, and Minardi F1 cars, and in 1997 the Blue Oval bankrolled three-time world champion Jackie Stewart’s eponymous F1 team, before purchasing the team outright in late 1999 and rebranding it as Jaguar Racing for the 2000 season. Though later Ford F1 engines didn’t enjoy the dominance of the DFV era, Ford remains the third most successful engine manufacturer in grand prix racing after Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari.

Ford’s collaboration with Red Bull Racing is deeper and more sophisticated than the DFV deal, hardly surprisingly given the incredible complexity of modern F1. There’s a certain neat symmetry to the relationship, too—when Ford decided to quit F1 in 2004, it sold Jaguar Racing to … Red Bull.

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Ford Performance Motorsports global director Mark Rushbrook says the company was already exploring a return to F1 when he met with Christian Horner in 2021. In the aftermath of Honda’s 2020 decision to withdraw from F1 as a powertrain supplier, and with little likelihood that either Mercedes-Benz or Ferrari would be willing to supply their biggest on-track rival with a powertrain, Red Bull had been working on developing and building its own powertrains.

“Initially our decision was to take Honda’s intellectual property and build and rebuild and maintain the current homologated engine to the end of its life,” says Horner. “But then having explored that, it became more and more complex because that process is not just about building the engines, but also the supply chains. In the end we decided we may as well do the whole thing. And that decision was made once the regulations [for the 2026 F1 powertrains] were fixed at the beginning of 2021.”

Red Bull had already spent six months in discussions with Porsche when Rushbrook reached out. “I literally got Christian's email address, sent him an email, and said, ‘Hey, do you want to talk?’,” he says. The first meeting was positive. “I felt maybe 20 minutes into that discussion that there was the foundation for a partnership,” Rushbrook recalls. “I left that meeting and called [Ford CEO] Jim Farley and then it accelerated quickly from there.”

From Christian Horner’s point of view, having Red Bull DNA in the project was key. “What we found in Ford was they were prepared at accommodate that,” he says. “Mark and Jim Farley said, ‘Look, you guys, you do Formula 1 every day. That's your bread and butter. We're not going to impose our methodology on you. You tell us how we can help, where can we assist’.”

Under the terms of the deal, Ford will work with Red Bull on the engineering and development of an F1 powertrain for both the main Red Bull team and its junior team, Visa Cash App RB. The Red Bull campus at Milton Keynes now has an entire building, completed in early 2022, devoted purely to engine design, engineering, and development. The head of power unit operations, Steve Brodie, spent 21 years working for what is now Mercedes AMG HPP, the Mercedes-Benz F1 engine producer. Many of the staff now working for Brodie on the Red Bull-Ford powertrain are former Mercedes AMG HPP employees.

Mark Rushbrook and Ford Performance Motorsports powertrain engineering manager Christian Hertrich are familiar faces at Milton Keynes. Rushbrook is on site every four to six weeks, and when he’s not there in person, Hertrich is on a weekly video conference call.

The new powertrain will be very different from the complex hybrid that has powered F1 cars since 2014. In simple terms, the 2026 F1 powertrains will have an e-motor/generator connected to the internal combustion engine that develops much more power—470 hp versus 160 hp—than the MGU-K of the current setup, and can also recoup more power, too. To reduce cost and complexity, the 2026 hybrids won’t have an e-motor/generator in the turbocharger (the MGU-H in the current powertrain that can both spin up the turbocharger and use it to recoup energy). The internal combustion engines will remain 1.6-liter V-6s but must run on sustainable synthetic fuel. Total system output is expected to be about 1000 hp.

“I think efficiency will be everything,” says Horner. “Basically, you've almost got a 50/50 split between ICE and electrification now. There are the usual challenges that go with that from a packaging point of view, from a weight point of view, from a cooling point of view. But the great thing of having [the engine development program] so embedded is that all those conversations are going on now with the chassis engineers,” says Horner. He points out the Ford partnership means Red Bull is now the only F1 team apart from Ferrari where both the engine and the chassis for the 2026 cars are being developed in-house on a single campus.

So, what’s in it for Ford? Big automakers have a checkered history when it comes to F1. The glamor and glory of taking part in top level motorsport has a substantial cost – Horner says the Red Bull-Ford partnership represents the biggest investment in a motorsport engine in the U.K. in 40 years – that eventually must be justified to both shareholders and customers.

Mark Rushbrook says Ford’s move into F1 is part of a wider corporate strategy that sees motorsport not just as a brand building marketing exercise, but also as a profitable business enterprise, particularly with customer racing vehicles such as the GT3, GT4 and Dark Horse R Mustang track cars and Bronco DR off-road racers. “We’re selling those cars, and we’re selling parts for those cars and engines. There is an opportunity to bring money back into the company,” he says.

F1 is a different proposition, but Rushbrook says the opportunity to partner with Red Bull gives Ford the opportunity to contribute at the highest level and learn the innovative processes and technologies that are key to success in F1 and transfer those learnings back into the company’s day-to-day operations where appropriate, all without having to buy or establish an F1 team of its own. For example, working on an F1 hybrid powertrain will give Ford valuable insights into high-performance hybrid road car engine and battery technologies. “There are differences in the duty cycle,” Rushbrook says, “but there are opportunities, especially in high performance applications for the road where you do need those short bursts of power.”

Ford’s commitment with Red Bull is through the end of 2030, when the F1 engine regulations are set to change again. Depending on the nature of those regulation changes, Rushbrook says Ford would look at extending the partnership. “I think it's a great way for Ford to have got involved without having the full responsibility and liability of needing to deliver to perform,” says Christian Horner. “It's a partnership that compliments what we're doing, and I think it'll set a blueprint for other manufacturers to look at similar models. I think it changes the way OEMs can come into F1.”

F1 is a tough business, and while Red Bull has dominated the past four seasons with lead driver Max Verstappen winning 50 of the 79 races up to and including the British Grand Prix, recent form suggests rival teams, McLaren in particular, have closed the performance gap. And the departure at the end of this season of Red Bull chief technology officer Adrian Newey, the mastermind behind the winningest grand prix cars of the modern era, will almost certainly close that gap even more as the team grapples with an all-new vehicle concept.

With barely 18 months to go before the first Red Bull-Ford-powered F1 car is due to roll down pit lane, Christian Horner is determined to hit the ground running with a power unit competitive with those coming from Mercedes, Ferrari, Honda and Audi. “They're all massive manufacturers with decades of experience,” he says. “We got three years of experience. But we've got a huge amount of passion. We've got some great people, we've got great facilities, we've got great partners and we've got all the attitude that served us so well in the 120 race wins that we've achieved so far. It'll be so rewarding when we add to that number with an engine that's been designed, built, and manufactured here in Milton Keynes.”