Ford Has Two F1 Wins in a Week. How Much of the Engine Is Really Ford’s?

Ford waited 23 years for a Formula 1 win. A week later it has two, and the man who runs its racing program has put in writing what the company expects in return — which has more to do with batteries and software than with trophies.

In a first-person column on Ford's corporate site, Ford Racing global director Mark Rushbrook calls Max Verstappen's Oct. 4 victory in a Red Bull-Ford "a massive validation" of a bet he says people questioned when it was announced in 2023. Ford counts it as the 177th Grand Prix win for an engine carrying its name, a tally built mostly by the Cosworth DFV V-8 that won 155 races.

What happened at Sepang

The race was the Bahrain Grand Prix in name only. Postponed in April, it was moved to Malaysia's Sepang circuit, where rain and a suspended start procedure delayed proceedings by more than 90 minutes.

Verstappen started from pole and beat Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli by 2.307 seconds, according to the FIA's race report. It was his first win of 2026 and the first for the Red Bull Ford Powertrains DM01 power unit, in its 16th race. All four cars using it finished in the top 10: Isack Hadjar was fifth for Red Bull, with Racing Bulls drivers Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad seventh and 10th.

The second win came quickly. On Oct. 11 Verstappen took pole in Singapore and led every lap, finishing 7.335 seconds ahead of Ferrari's Charles Leclerc.

How much of it is Ford's?

Rushbrook is careful on this point. He writes of Ford "playing our part," not of a Ford engine — and the distinction matters.

The DM01 was designed and built at Red Bull's campus in Milton Keynes, England, by a team led by Ben Hodgkinson. When the deal was announced in New York in February 2023, Ford said its contribution would be battery cell and electric motor technology, power unit control software, and analytics, under an agreement running through at least 2030. Rushbrook names Christian Hertrich as the lead of the Dearborn side.

Those areas line up with what the 2026 rules changed. The new power units pair a combustion engine built for fully sustainable fuel with a 350 kW (469 hp) electric motor. The electrical side is the part of the car closest to what Ford sells.

The history is similar. Ford's name was on the DFV, but Cosworth built it. Formula 1's own count had Ford Cosworth on 176 wins before Sepang, third behind Ferrari and Mercedes, with the last coming from Giancarlo Fisichella's Jordan in Brazil in 2003.

Why Ford says it races

Rushbrook gives three reasons: returning value to the business, reaching younger fans, and moving technology between track and street. He says lessons from high-voltage battery packs, electric motors, and control software under race conditions flow "directly back" into production, and that Ford's experience building hybrids at scale went the other way.

The timeline is longer than the column suggests. In August, before the first win, Rushbrook told The Detroit News that the benefits could take five to 10 years to reach road cars, and that he was "content" to be racing among the top four.

He also ties the program to the Raptor trucks and Mustang race cars, the same racing-to-showroom argument behind what a Baja 1000 winner says matters most in the F-150 Raptor. And Ford is not the only Detroit badge on the grid: Cadillac's F1 team got one car to the finish at Sepang, in 19th.

"We honor that heritage every day. But heritage doesn't give you horsepower down the straight," Rushbrook writes.

What comes next

The stated target is both world championships, and those are a long way off. After Sepang, Antonelli led the drivers' standings with 320 points, and Red Bull was fourth among constructors, 18 points behind McLaren.

Ford's next chance to add to the count comes at home. The United States Grand Prix in Austin runs Oct. 23–25.