Red Bull and Ford's first season as an F1 engine partnership was always going to be a leap into the unknown. The DM01 power unit — named in tribute to late Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz — was firing on a dyno for the first time as recently as August 2022, with no F1 engine heritage to lean on inside Red Bull Powertrains and only a 55-week construction window for the Milton Keynes engine facility itself.
Four races into the 2026 season, the verdict from inside the project is cautious satisfaction. Ford Performance director Mark Rushbrook, the man Ford put in charge of its return to top-line motorsport, was asked by Autosport to assess the state of the programme — and his answer captured the scale of what has just been achieved.
"It's been a long journey, three and a half years to get the power unit on track, so it was fantastic to see that in Melbourne for the start of the season," Rushbrook said.
The Australian Grand Prix opener was the moment Ford's branding lit up an F1 starting grid for the first time since the early 2000s, and the early competitive picture has matched the symbolism. Red Bull and Racing Bulls have both scored points consistently. Mercedes remains the benchmark, but the gap to the front of the field is one that internal targets had braced Red Bull and Ford to accept might be far larger in year one.
"We knew what an incredible challenge it would be, simply to get on the grid with the new power unit, to be honest," Rushbrook added.
Asked whether being in the conversation with Mercedes felt like vindication, the Ford executive permitted himself a measured smile.
"But to be in the mix like we are, it certainly feels good."
Ford's role inside the partnership has expanded well beyond what was originally negotiated. When Jim Farley's leadership at Ford committed to F1 in early 2023, the manufacturer's contribution was understood to be focused on the electrification side of the new 2026 regulations — the side of the formula where road-relevance and Ford's existing R&D centres were strongest.
"The original list was focused on the electrification part of it: the battery cell, the motor, the inverter, the software, and the calibration board," Rushbrook said.
In practice, the scope crept. Once Ford engineers began working day-to-day inside the Milton Keynes campus, the manufacturer was drawn into combustion engine work, materials science and advanced production methods — the parts of an F1 programme that traditionally never touch a road-car manufacturer.
"The biggest area that we didn't expect is how far it's pushed us on some things like additive manufacturing or advanced manufacturing," Rushbrook revealed.
That shift mirrors what Red Bull has openly described internally as one of the most significant industrial undertakings in the team's history. Building an engine facility from scratch, hiring an engine workforce from scratch, and qualifying a new combustion architecture from scratch — all to a 2026 regulatory deadline that nobody in the project was prepared to miss — has stretched both partners beyond anything either had attempted alone.
The question still hanging over the programme is how quickly Red Bull and Ford can close the residual gap to Mercedes. Rushbrook's reading of the situation in mid-May was diplomatic.
"There's racing, there's technical, and there's politics, for sure," he said of the comparative benchmarking inside the paddock, before adding of Mercedes: "Well, yeah, it's pretty good."
The wider story, beyond a single season's results, is that Ford has effectively used the F1 partnership to retool entire areas of its own engineering capability — additive manufacturing being only the most visible — while Red Bull has converted a multi-billion-dollar gamble into an engine that, on race-one pace, was not the embarrassment many in the paddock had predicted. For Ford's first season back in F1, that is a long way from disaster, and a respectable distance closer to genuine success.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/ford-rushbrook-red-bull-dm01-power-unit-2026-in-the-mix). Visit for full coverage.*