Explained: why Red Bull has F1's top ranked engine under ADUO

[DodgyDepot]

The FIA's latest ADUO assessment has come back with the same result as before, ranking Red Bull Ford's engine as the strongest internal combustion unit on the grid. Mercedes sits a few percent behind, with Ferrari, Audi and Honda further off the pace. The catch is that ADUO only measures the internal combustion engine on its own rather than the whole hybrid power unit package. That narrow scope is turning into the most talked about flaw in the whole system

Toto Wolff has openly said Mercedes actually has the best overall power unit this year, batteries and all. Red Bull's own team boss has more or less agreed with him too. Yet under ADUO's rules it's Red Bull that gets locked out of the extra development tokens everyone else is receiving

Manufacturers judged more than two percent off the benchmark get extra homologation slots and dyno time to help them catch up. Being ranked on top of the ICE metric means Red Bull can't touch that catch-up mechanism at all, even though it's behind on the electrical side of the package. The FIA has acknowledged the system has weaknesses and its single seater director has said he was open to factoring in more parameters like turbo size. Teams apparently pushed back and asked to keep the whole thing simple instead

So Red Bull ends up stuck with a strong engine on paper but a genuinely weaker overall package with no path to fix it under current rules. Feels like a case where a metric being simple to measure won out over a metric being actually useful

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