Max Verstappen’s world championship hopes depend on how fast Red Bull have caught up to their competitors as they produce their own power units for the first time, their engine boss admits.
The Dutchman was forced to surrender his crown to Lando Norris in last season’s finale in Abu Dhabi, having dominated the sport in winning four successive titles.
Those championships were powered by Honda, but Red Bull is embarking on the huge challenge of producing their own power units in partnership with Ford.
Team principal Laurent Mekies admitted last year they have a “mountain to climb” but Red Bull Ford Powertrains technical director Ben Hodgkinson believes the work has been done to enable them to compete at the front of the grid.
“I’ve been doing this for 27 years so everything I do has got to be backed up by the belief I can do it,” Hodgkinson, who has spent three-and-a-half years leading the project, said.
“I don’t think you belong in this industry if you don’t believe that.
“I also, it’s almost part of my own personal ethos, but I think that if you show me a confident engineer I’ll show you one that’s about to lose.
“So you can never underestimate where everybody is. You always have to assume you’re behind so that you always push the absolute maximum.
“What am I confident about? I’m confident that the team I’ve built is incredible. I’m confident the facilities we put together are going to be benchmark. But we’re a newcomer.
“We had to build factories while people started developing engines so I think we started behind. But I think the people and the facilities we’ve got are better than everybody else.
“So watch this space. Will I overtake them by race one? I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Reiterating the mountain Red Bull have to climb with their own power units, Mekies urged fans to “bear with us” at the start of the season.
“We know it’s going to come with some difficulties,” he told Sky Sports. “We know we are going to have quite a few sleepless nights and a few headaches, but please bear with us for the first few months.
“Nobody underestimates the size of the mountain that we have to climb. It’s the sort of challenge we all want to be associated with, and hopefully, eventually we will come out on top.
“I think it would be naive, to say the least, for us to think that, yes, we have done everything from zero — with great support from Ford — and then we turn up at the first race and we are the same level as people that have been doing it for many years. It’s not going to be like that, we are going to be trailing them.”
Red Bull started their power unit production from scratch, bringing in over 700 people to work on the project and building three factories.
The team are up against established and experienced manufacturers in Mercedes, Ferrari and Honda.
Much of the talk ahead of the new season — and arguably the biggest regulation change in the sport’s history — has been that Mercedes-powered teams will be ahead of the pack.
But Hodgkinson, who spent over 20 years at Mercedes, is not convinced that is the case.
“I think a lot of that talk originated from Mercedes themselves. My gran used to say, an empty can rattles the loudest,” Hodgkinson said.
“We’ll let the results do the talking, I think. Mercedes are a very competent power unit manufacturer. I spent 20 years there. So I know it very, very well.
“I was able to make sure that everything that we did here was better than it was done previously.”
Information from PA contributed to this report.
