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

10849635www.motorsport.com

[JayJ]

The turbo size point is interesting because Ferrari apparently benefited from running smaller ones early in the season for a straight line advantage. Tradeoffs like that are exactly why isolating just the ICE for ranking purposes seems flawed.

Curious if the FIA revisits this for next season given how much noise it's created

[DeanAmbrose11]

I get why they kept it simple though. The second they start factoring in turbo size, energy deployment efficiency and whatever else, you open up a massive argument about weighting each factor fairly. Simplicity avoids that fight but clearly creates a different one instead. There's no clean answer here

[PlanckLimit36]

Classic case of measuring what's easy instead of what matters. If Mercedes has the better full package then the ranking system is basically lying by omission

[Sinead]

This whole saga says a lot about how tricky it is to regulate hybrid engines fairly across manufacturers with different design philosophies. Ford came in as a newcomer with Red Bull and apparently nailed the combustion side while still catching up on electrical deployment. Mercedes went the other way, building a slightly weaker ICE but squeezing more out of the battery and energy recovery systems. Ranking only one half of that equation was always going to produce a weird outcome for somebody. Feels less like a conspiracy and more like a rulebook that hasn't caught up with reality yet

[Midnight Wolf]

Red Bull must be furious being locked out of tokens while sitting on the objectively weaker overall car. Being the best at one specific metric while losing everywhere else that matters is a rough position to be stuck in. Especially with Mercedes team boss basically confirming it out loud

[Mike80]

Honda's new powertrain from Zandvoort wasn't included in this assessment which seems like a notable omission. Could shuffle the whole ranking around next time depending on how it actually performs