Red 1.0 won't feature many optimizations. So at that time the performance will be comparable to python. After that, their plan is to rewrite the codegenerator in a modular way so that more targets, as well as more optimizations can be added. Also, a JIT compiler will be added. The plans for Red 2.0, as much as I know, is to achieve performance as close to C as possible.

I don't have any benchmarks to share, but I think it's safe to assume that Red will be faster than Python, as it's designed to be statically compiled.