There is a specific kind of Red Bull season that begins with a paddock leak. The team's 2026 campaign now has one. And the first confirmation of it has come, in almost deadpan fashion, from a Mercedes driver.
Asked at Suzuka whether the early-season Mercedes advantage was sustainable, George Russell framed his answer in the language of a title contender who does not want to say the quiet part out loud.
"Right now as Mercedes we have a small advantage over Ferrari and a good advantage over everyone else," Russell said. "But these things change so quickly. You know, we saw in the press last week, it was leaked a bit about Red Bull being a bit overweight. So they could probably improve this quite quickly and they look fast in Melbourne. McLaren still haven't brought any updates to the car and they obviously have a Mercedes engine in the back."
The phrasing is careful. Russell is not the one making the claim. He is the one acknowledging that the claim is already out there — a press leak about Red Bull being "a bit overweight" — and treating it as a reason Mercedes' current dominance may not last. Inside the Red Bull camp, having a rival title contender casually reference a weight problem is close to the worst possible version of the story leaking.
The follow-up has come from independent analysis, not from Milton Keynes. On the Suzuka preview edition of his weekly F1 show, LawVS treated Red Bull's weight issue as one symptom of a broader crisis.
"The RB22 is struggling with weight, and I think — even though on Mekies' I saw like a ping on Twitter that they said that they are basically struggling in all areas," he said.
"Mekies" is the detail that matters. Laurent Mekies, Red Bull Racing's team principal, has publicly leaned on the language of "full attack mode" at every post-race media session. The Twitter exchange LawVS referenced — widely shared in F1 analyst circles this week — briefly appeared to have Red Bull's own principal conceding that the struggle extends beyond the single weight complaint into chassis, aerodynamics and power unit deployment. That is not the narrative any team principal plans to publish on a Saturday night after qualifying.
The technical context makes Russell's leak-reference plausible. Red Bull brought its first major upgrade package of the 2026 season to the opening races. The package was not universally praised by independent engineers. LawVS, speaking before Suzuka, called it an "upgrade that is not working" — a characterisation that slots uncomfortably well alongside Max Verstappen's own description of the car's behaviour, "not sustainable," later delivered to reporters at Suzuka.
Weight, in the 2026 regulations, is the hardest thing to remove in-season. The cars are already at the floor of the legal minimum. Any excess weight on a specific chassis tends to be structural — inside the monocoque, inside the ERS housing, inside the cooling pack — and therefore slow to address. A mid-season weight rebalancing programme is a six-to-eight-week engineering effort in the best case. In the worst case, it is a B-spec chassis.
Russell's careful phrasing suggests he believes Red Bull's version of this problem is the faster-to-fix variant. His reference to Melbourne pace — where Red Bull had looked more competitive — supports the reading that the team has a recoverable margin rather than a structural hole. LawVS's independent reading is less charitable, placing weight inside a longer list of faults.
Neither interpretation is flattering to Red Bull. Between a rival team principal's leak, a Mercedes driver repeating it, and an analyst expanding the list, the team has spent a single race week being publicly talked about as a broken-but-fixable organisation. That is not a space Red Bull is used to occupying.
The next chapters write themselves. Red Bull's five-race stretch before the Miami Grand Prix is the shortest window in which any meaningful weight reduction could be validated. Whether the team arrives in Miami with a visibly lighter car — or with the same package and a different set of explanations — will be the first real paddock verdict on how deep the RB22's problems actually go.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/red-bull-rb22-overweight-leak-russell-lawvs-struggling-all-areas-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
