Verstappen's Singapore Win Tests Russell's Claim That Red Bull Is the Team to Beat

Max Verstappen won Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix from pole position, finishing ahead of Charles Leclerc and Andrea Kimi Antonelli at Marina Bay. The result has given fresh weight to George Russell’s claim that Red Bull is now “the team to beat”, a remark that has drawn a response from Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies. The claim deserves a proper test rather than a reflex verdict, because this season’s numbers point in two directions at once.

What one night at Marina Bay proves

Start with what Singapore showed. Verstappen qualified on pole and converted it, which is the cleanest form of victory there is. Leclerc started second and finished second. Antonelli, the championship leader, gained a place to finish third from fourth on the grid. Behind them the McLarens held station, with Lando Norris fourth and Oscar Piastri fifth. Lewis Hamilton slipped from third on the grid to sixth.

The detail that should interest Red Bull most came further down. Isack Hadjar started 22nd and finished 10th, putting both Red Bulls in the points on a circuit where overtaking is notoriously difficult. A car that can carry its second driver through the field in Singapore has a usable race-pace window, and that is harder to fake than a single qualifying lap.

Now the caveats. Russell’s own weekend was compromised from the start. He lined up 19th and recovered to ninth, so Sunday was never a direct contest between his Mercedes and Verstappen’s Red Bull. The fairer comparison is Antonelli, who had a representative weekend and was beaten by a Red Bull and a Ferrari. That is a meaningful data point, but it is only one.

Singapore is also an outlier. It is a slow, bumpy street circuit that rewards traction, braking stability and a car that rides the kerbs well. It tells you a great deal about mechanical grip and very little about how a car behaves through fast, flowing corners. Red Bull knows this better than anyone. In 2023, when it won every other race of the season, Marina Bay was the one place where its car fell apart. A result here, good or bad, has always needed corroborating elsewhere.

The scoreboard Russell is arguing against

If “team to beat” means the strongest operation of 2026, the season-long record is unambiguous.

Team	Constructors’ points	Wins	Position
Mercedes	578	11	1st
Ferrari	444	2	2nd
McLaren	339	2	3rd
Red Bull	332	2	4th

Mercedes has won 11 of the 17 grands prix held so far: eight for Antonelli, three for Russell. Its drivers occupy the top two places in the championship, on 340 and 238 points. Red Bull, by contrast, sits fourth among the constructors, 246 points behind Mercedes and seven behind McLaren. Singapore was only Verstappen’s second win of the year, the same tally as Norris and one more than either Ferrari driver.

The gap between Red Bull’s two cars matters too. Verstappen has 221 points and is fourth in the drivers’ standings. Hadjar has 97 and is eighth. Mercedes’ strength this year has rested on two drivers capable of winning on any given weekend; Red Bull’s has rested largely on one. Hadjar’s drive through the field in Singapore was encouraging, but a team that wants to be favourite needs its second car regularly fighting for podiums, not points.

This does not disprove Russell, but it reframes his claim. He is almost certainly not arguing that Red Bull has been the best team of 2026. He is arguing about trajectory, and on trajectory one strong weekend is a starting point, not a trend.

Why Russell might want Red Bull to be favourites

Why would a Mercedes driver hand a rival the favourite’s tag? In Formula 1 that kind of compliment is rarely given freely. Talking up the opposition has been part of the sport’s grammar for as long as there has been a pecking order. Mercedes spent much of the hybrid era insisting that Red Bull or Ferrari would be the ones to beat, often days before winning comfortably. Moving the weight of expectation onto someone else costs nothing and occasionally buys a little breathing room.

Russell’s position adds another layer. He is 102 points behind his own team-mate with six rounds left, and his title hopes depend on Mercedes continuing to bring performance to the car rather than settling into defending a lead that Antonelli already holds. A driver in that position has every reason to want his factory alarmed by the threat in the next garage, and framing Red Bull as the benchmark is one way to keep the development pressure on.

That does not make him wrong. Drivers see rival cars up close on track, and Russell will have formed impressions that no timing screen fully captures. It does mean his assessment should be read as both an observation and a message.

Mekies and the engine question

Team principals, for their part, rarely gain anything from accepting the favourite’s mantle in October. Mekies, in his first full season in charge after succeeding Christian Horner in the summer of 2025, has every incentive to keep expectations measured while his team builds momentum.

There is a deeper reason for caution. This is the first year of a sweeping regulation reset, and the first season of Red Bull’s in-house power unit project with Ford. Few teams have ever built an engine from scratch and been immediately competitive. If Red Bull’s late-season improvement reflects real progress on its engine rather than a circuit that suited its chassis, that is a structural shift with consequences well beyond this season. That is the question to watch.

Austin is the fairer examination

Round 18, the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas on 25 October, will be a far more complete test than Singapore. Austin combines a high-speed opening sector through the esses with heavy braking zones and slow hairpins, so it asks questions of aerodynamic efficiency, power delivery and tyre management in a single lap. Verstappen has a strong record there, which raises the bar rather than lowers it. A Red Bull win in Austin would confirm a genuine shift only if it came on merit against two Mercedes drivers enjoying clean weekends.

Three things would make Russell’s case convincing over the coming rounds:

• Qualifying pace on a conventional circuit. If Red Bull can out-qualify both Mercedes cars at a track that rewards downforce and straight-line speed, the Singapore pole stops looking like a one-off.
• Hadjar’s position. A second Red Bull running near the front would mark a real change in the team’s competitiveness.
• Repeatability. Two wins in 17 races describes a strong car with peaks. Consecutive wins across contrasting circuits would point to a car that has become the benchmark.

What the arithmetic still allows

Whatever happens, the drivers’ title arithmetic limits how much Red Bull’s form can change the outcome this year. Verstappen is 119 points behind Antonelli. Even if he won all six remaining grands prix with Antonelli second every time, he would recover only 42 points from the grands prix alone and would still trail by 77. The title is Mercedes’ to lose, and the realistic contest is whether Russell can make Antonelli work for it.

The constructors’ table offers Red Bull a more tangible target. Second place, 112 points behind Ferrari, is a long way off. Third place, seven points behind McLaren, is well within reach, and it carries real prize money.

Russell has identified the team with the most momentum, and the Singapore result gives that view some substance. On the evidence of a full season, though, “team to beat” still overstates it: Mercedes remains the reference, and one win on F1’s most idiosyncratic circuit does not overturn 11. If Verstappen beats a clean Mercedes at Austin, the conversation will shift quickly, though less towards this championship than towards whether Red Bull’s new engine project has arrived a year early and made the team a genuine threat for 2027.