Laurent Mekies, Red Bull’s F1 boss, has used the word “crazy” to describe the scale of the team’s new in-house engine program. With support from Ford, Red Bull has built its very first F1 engine for 2026, powering its own team and the sister Racing Bulls outfit.

Ten new cars, five days, no fans. And plenty of security. Formula 1 started a new era with the public and the media excluded from the teams' reliability-focused private testing session in Spain on Monday.

Red Bull's second day of Formula 1 testing ended early with Isack Hadjar backing the RB22 into the barriers.

Mercedes is the favourite for both constructors' and drivers' title glory in F1 2026, especially as it backed up said promise by being the standout in this week's Barcelona shakedown

Going fastest in testing may be a good morale boost, but history shows it is not always a guarantee of title success.

As part of it, we polled readers for their thoughts. The result was a resounding defeat for me, as my position of being “against” F1 testing being held in private scored only 43.7 percent compared to Luke’s “for” argument getting 56.3 percent of the vote.

Barcelona Shakedown with Ted Kravitz and guests every evening this week on Sky Sports F1 at 9pm, also available on YouTube