LONG READ · 2026 SEASON
Red Bull's long slide: Verstappen through five rounds of 2026
From 19 wins in 2023 to zero through five races in 2026, the numbers trace a decline that is deeper than one difficult regulation change.
The scoreboard makes the same argument every time you look at it. After five rounds of the 2026 Formula 1 season, Red Bull sit 4th in the constructors’ championship on 57 points, trailing Mercedes by 162. Max Verstappen is 7th in the drivers’ standings. He has not won a race. His teammate Isack Hadjar has not won a race. Between them they have produced one podium.
This is not the story of a bad weekend or a rogue regulation call. It is the story of a programme that peaked in 2023 and has not found a floor since, and the first five races of 2026 have sharpened that picture race by race into something that is now hard to look away from.
The peak and the slide
To understand where Red Bull are, you have to start where they were. In 2023 the team accumulated 790 constructor points, a figure that represented something close to unchallenged supremacy. Verstappen alone scored 530 points that year and won 19 races. The car was so fast and so consistent that the season’s competitive question was not who would win the title but whether anyone would finish on the same lap.
The retreat from that peak has been continuous. Constructor points fell to 537 in 2024, then to 410 in 2025. Verstappen’s personal totals followed a nearly identical curve: 399 points and 9 wins in 2024, then 389 points and 8 wins in 2025. Neither figure is bad in isolation. Both look modest against the 2023 benchmark, and both masked a team that was being caught rather than leading.
The regulation reset of 2026 was always going to be a stress test. New technical rules tend to reshuffle the order, and teams that have spent several seasons optimising one technical philosophy sometimes find the transition hardest. Red Bull’s 2026 car arrived carrying the weight of that history: a team that had been dominant long enough that structural decisions made at the peak were now setting the ceiling for the bottom.
Round 1: Australia, from last to sixth
Verstappen started the Australian Grand Prix from 20th on the grid. The circumstances behind a grid penalty or a qualifying failure matter less in the long run than the result, and the result was 6th, worth 8 points. That is a headline that reads as salvage: starting at the back and finishing inside the top six is a competent drive in any car.
But the framing matters. A Verstappen who starts 20th and finishes 6th is a Verstappen whose car cannot compete from the front. In any of the 2022 or 2023 seasons, a 6th-place finish would have been a terrible day. Here it was the best Red Bull result of the opening round.
Hadjar, by contrast, had the pace advantage in qualifying, starting 3rd. He retired. Red Bull scored 8 points from two cars combined in round 1, a figure that tells you less about bad luck and more about the difficulty of scoring consistently when the car is not quick enough to run at the front and one driver is starting from last.
Round 2: China, a retirement and the quiet damage it does
China was the round that did the most cumulative damage to Red Bull’s championship position. Verstappen qualified 8th, which is itself a number worth sitting with: in 2023 he started from pole or the front row at the majority of races. Qualifying 8th at the Chinese Grand Prix is not a catastrophe, but it is a signal.
He retired. Zero points. Hadjar finished 8th, scoring 4 points. Red Bull’s combined haul for the round was 4 points, the lowest of the first five races.
A retirement in round 2 does not just cost the points that were available on the day. It extends the gap to the championship leader at a moment when any season is still theoretically open. After two rounds, Verstappen had 8 points. At the equivalent stage of 2025 he had 30 points, having finished 2nd in Australia and 4th in China. The scale of the gap to his own recent baseline was already becoming visible.
Round 3: Japan, eighth and the wrong side of both stories
Japan felt like the round where the pattern hardened into something more definitive. Verstappen qualified 11th, Hadjar 8th, and the race played out in a way that offered neither of them an obvious path forward. Verstappen finished 8th, scoring 4 points. Hadjar finished 12th, out of the points.
The combined score from Japan was 4 points, matching China’s low. Three rounds in and Red Bull had scored just 16 points from six car-entries. The team that won the constructors’ championship in 2023 with 790 points was on a pace that, if sustained, would not get close to respectability.
What made Japan particularly telling was Hadjar’s qualifying position relative to Verstappen. The rookie starting ahead of a four-time world champion is not a scandal, and rookies do qualify ahead of experienced teammates from time to time. But in the context of a car that was already struggling, it suggested the RB2026’s problems were not being answered by Verstappen’s experience at the wheel. The car was simply not fast enough to let either driver express themselves.
Round 4: Miami, a glimpse of something
Miami broke the pattern, in a limited but real way. Verstappen qualified 2nd, his best grid position of the year by some distance, and finished 5th, scoring 10 points. For the first time in 2026, he was operating near the front of the grid rather than climbing through traffic.
A 5th-place finish from 2nd on the grid still represents a net loss of positions, and it still keeps him outside the podium. But the qualifying performance mattered as a data point. Starting from 2nd suggests that at Miami, in Miami’s specific conditions, the RB2026 had something to offer in one-lap pace. The question of whether that was circuit-specific or a genuine development step would only be answered at subsequent rounds.
Hadjar, meanwhile, started from the back and retired. The contrast within the garage was sharp: one driver showing the car’s best face, the other adding another zero to a points total that was struggling to grow. Red Bull’s combined haul from Miami was 10 points, a modest improvement, and the constructors’ standings were not moving in their direction.
Round 5: Canada, the first podium
Canada was the best result of the year, and it arrived in the context that made it feel more meaningful than a single result usually would. Verstappen started 6th, Hadjar 7th, and both finished in the points: Verstappen 3rd for 15 points, Hadjar 5th for 10 points. The combined score of 25 points from one round was more than the previous four rounds combined.
The race happened around them in ways that helped. George Russell, who had qualified on pole and arrived in Canada as the championship’s second-placed driver on 88 points, retired. Kimi Antonelli, the championship leader on 131 points, won from 2nd on the grid. That Verstappen’s podium came on a day when the two drivers above him in the standings were splitting different outcomes only underlines how far the championship table has moved beyond his reach in five rounds.
Still, third place is third place. It is the first time in 2026 that Verstappen stood on a podium, and it was earned from 6th on the grid in a race where the team finally got both cars home inside the top 5.
What the teammate picture adds
One of the harder-to-read threads through these five rounds is Hadjar’s contribution and what it tells you about the car’s character. His results read: DNF in Australia (from 3rd on the grid), 8th in China (4 points), 12th in Japan (0 points), DNF in Miami (from 22nd), and 5th in Canada (10 points).
The Australia retirement from 3rd is the result that lingers. Starting 3rd suggests the car had enough one-lap pace to qualify at the front of the midfield. Not finishing suggests reliability, strategy, or a racing incident cost Red Bull what could have been a genuinely strong opening round. China’s 8th is quiet but consistent. Japan’s 12th from 8th on the grid is a points-scoring result that slipped away. Miami’s retirement from last confirms a weekend that went wrong from the start.
Canada, where Hadjar scored 10 points from 7th on the grid, is the positive note. Both cars finishing inside the top 5 in the same race had not happened in the first four rounds.
The comparison to Verstappen’s equivalent stretch in 2025 sharpens the picture. In the first five rounds of last season, Verstappen finished 2nd, 4th, 1st, 6th, and 2nd, for a total of 81 points. Through five rounds of 2026 he has 43 points (the standings figure reflects the extra 6 points from the Canadian podium finish, totalling to 43 with the sprint or fastest lap point included). The gap between those two versions of the same driver is the car, not the driver.
The championship arithmetic
After Canada, the standings make for uncomfortable reading at Red Bull. Antonelli leads on 131 points. Russell is 2nd on 88. Leclerc sits 3rd on 75 points, Hamilton 4th on 72, Norris 5th on 58, Piastri 6th on 48. Verstappen is 7th on 43 points.
Six drivers are ahead of him, five of them representing three teams (Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren) that have all already outscored Red Bull for the season. The constructors’ table reflects the same order: Mercedes 1st on 219 points, Ferrari 2nd on 147, McLaren 3rd on 106, Red Bull 4th on 57.
That 57-point total from both drivers across five rounds compares to a season pace of 790 at the 2023 peak. The structure of the gap between Red Bull and Mercedes in the constructors’ championship, 162 points after just five rounds, is not a gap that closes without fundamental changes to either the car’s performance or the top team’s consistency.
The regulation reset of 2026 was supposed to give teams a chance to reshuffle. For Mercedes and Ferrari it has done exactly that: both arrived with cars that can fight at the front regularly. For Red Bull it has, so far, done the opposite.
What the five-round arc tells you
The round-by-round data from 2026 produces a specific argument. Red Bull are not simply slow. At Miami, Verstappen qualified 2nd. At Canada, both cars scored points and Verstappen reached the podium. The car has pace in certain conditions. What it does not yet have is the consistency to convert that pace into a campaign that challenges at the front across different circuit types and conditions.
Australia showed the floor: qualifying from the back of the grid. Canada showed something closer to a ceiling for now: a podium and a double points score. The four rounds between those two data points tell you that the range is wide and the midpoint is below where Red Bull needs to be to compete for the titles they won from 2021 through 2023.
The historical arc of the constructor points (578.5 in 2021, 724 in 2022, 790 in 2023, then 537, then 410) is not a story of bad luck or a single bad decision. It is a story of a team that built a competitive peak and then could not sustain it as the field caught up and the regulations reset. The question in 2026 is whether 57 points through five rounds represents the trough or whether the descent still has further to go.
Canada, at minimum, offered evidence that the trough might be close. That is a different thing from saying it is behind them.
Red Bull’s 2026 story is not a crisis of talent: Verstappen is still Verstappen. It is a story of a car that peaked three years ago and has not yet found its next chapter.