While the Formula 1 world digests Christian Horner’s shock sacking as team principal and CEO of Red Bull Racing, at Milton Keynes his replacement is busy getting his feet under the desk.
Laurent Mekies has stepped into one of Formula 1’s most scrutinised positions, and following title-winning titan Horner, he has big shoes to fill.
He’ll need to fill them quickly, and not just because the season is already underway.
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Red Bull Racing faces several significant questions over its short and medium-term future for which he’s now responsible.
How he responds could make or break one of the most successful teams of the sport’s modern era.
WHO IS LAURENT MEKIES?
You probably couldn’t find two more opposing characters than Horner and Mekies.
Horner is a former aspiring racing driver who realised early that he didn’t have what it takes to cut it on the track. Instead he ploughed his efforts into team ownership and management in the lower formulae.
There are some attitudinal parallels between that abandoned aspiration and his eventual career — certainly Horner was never afraid to get his elbows out when it came to securing Red Bull Racing any political or sporting advantage available to it. He never minded being the centre of attention either.
Mekies, on the other hand, comes from the engineering world. It’s a path well-trodden by managers past but feels particularly representative of today’s Formula 1 — Andrea Stella and McLaren, Andy Cowell at Aston Martin, James Vowles at Williams, Ayao Komatsu at Haas and Jonathan Wheatley at Sauber all have engineering backgrounds.
Mekies, 48 years old, was born in Tours, France, which is around 2.5 hours southwest of Paris but only an hour south of the world-renowned Circuit de la Sarthe, home of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
He attended ESTACA, the Parisian aeronautic and automatic engineering college that counts Ferrari team boss Frédéric Vasseur among its alumni, and he completed his master’s degree in automotive engineering at Loughborough University in the UK.
His journey in Formula 1 started with Peugeot’s now defunct engine program in 2000, which quickly saw him transition to the Arrows team as an engine performance specialist in 2001 to 2002.
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With his foot now firmly in the door, he moved to Italian team Minardi in 2003 as a race engineer under Australian owner and team principal Paul Stoddart, progressing to the role of chief engineer and eventually head of vehicle performance. The team was bought by Red Bull and rebranded as Toro Rosso in 2006, and in 2008 Mekies celebrated his first grand prix victory when Sebastian Vettel won the 2008 Italian Grand Prix.
His career changed direction in 2014, when he joined the FIA as safety director and deputy race director under former race director Charlie Whiting, where perhaps his most significant achievement was the introduction of the halo head protection device now ubiquitous in single-seater racing around the world.
Mekies’s first major brush with Formula 1 politics came in 2018, when he left the governing body to join Ferrari as sporting director in 2018. It was a controversial move given no gardening leave was required between jobs, triggering concern among rival teams over his access to privileged competitive data at the FIA and what advantage that could bring the Scuderia.
He rose to the rank of racing director in 2021 — effectively the manager of all racetrack activities for the team — until he was poached back by Red Bull to run Racing Bulls from 2024, where he replaced long-serving principal Franz Tost, who had been the team’s only boss and an original hire of Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz, much like Horner at Red Bull Racing.
After just 18 months he’s earnt the biggest and highest profile promotion of his career, and he’ll be thrown into the deep end of some of the most heavily scrutinised management decisions he’ll ever have to make — questions that effectively ended Horner’s career.
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THE MAX VERSTAPPEN PROBLEM
The team’s biggest problem will have been front of Mekies’s mind when he first walked through the door at Milton Keynes.
In the second year of steep decline, Max Verstappen is the team’s most performant part, and after an exodus of high-profile and title-winning staff, his loss would be a body blow to results and morale.
Keeping the faith with the four-time champion is imperative — assuming Horner hasn’t been dismissed because Verstappen has already given notice.
But the consensus of the moment is that Mekies’s elevation will ensure the Dutchman hangs around for at least next season.
It’s the most logical decision for him. The 2026 competitive order is impossible to know before pre-season testing at the earliest. Pre-emptively switching teams risks committing to the wrong one.
But the fact that it was — or is — even a possibility speaks to the depth of feeling between Verstappen’s management and Horner over the way the Red Bull Racing ship was being sailed.
If nothing else, just consider how the team has slipped from executing the most one-sided season in Formula 1 history in 2023 to finishing a likely fourth in the constructors championship this year.
Horner carries the can for that — regardless of whether you think it’s a sackable offence — and there’s a view that it could be because the former boss spread himself too thin as the ultimate supervisor over Red Bull’s sprawling Formula 1 empire.
Mekies will bring a new approach to management. While he’ll be CEO as well as team principal, same as Horner, he presumably won’t feel the same need to be the master of all domains. This team isn’t his baby; it’s his job, and his mission is clear.
Performance will decide whether Verstappen will stay. To some extent that’s out of Mekies’s hands given so many of the critical 2026 wheels are already turning, but satisfying the Dutchman that the team is moving in the right direction again could be enough for him to keep the faith, at least for another season.
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THE YUKI TSUNODA PROBLEM
Intrinsic to the team’s performance is the competitiveness of the second driver.
After all, if the second car were scoring at a respectable rate relative to Verstappen — say, at 70 per cent — Red Bull Racing would’ve won the constructors title last year and would be running a solid second in this year’s championship, albeit still far behind McLaren.
Yuki Tsunoda is only the latest in a long line of canaries in the coalmine for the problems that are now afflicting the team. The car has been difficult to drive for years, but Verstappen’s superlative talent has been the perfect cover. It’s only now, so far down the road of development that even the Dutchman is no longer consistently competitive, that the problems are laid bare.
It’s perhaps here more than anywhere else that the team could use a different hand on the tiller.
Mekies’s tenure at Racing Bulls may have been brief, but there he ran a team set up to welcome drivers transiently. Young guns usually spend no more than a few years in Faenza before being promoted to Red Bull Racing or turfed. In that respect it’s the opposite to the Verstappen-orbiting Milton Keynes.
An engineer by trade, the direction he can set as team principal could be crucial to breaking the technical department out of its rut.
To draw a parallel, McLaren’s dramatic form improvement came after Stella took the helm and made limited but super-effective changes to the technical structure and processes — though his predecessor, Andreas Seidl, also had an engineering background, albeit with a longer management history.
But while he might be the circuit-breaker for the team’s broader problem, he might also be a solution to Tsunoda’s specific woes.
Mekies was a major public supporter of Tsunoda at Racing Bulls and was enthusiastic about his promotion earlier this year.
“His progress last year, and more recently from the very start of 2025, has been nothing less than sensational,” he said at the time.
“Personally and collectively it has been an immense privilege to witness those progresses for all of us in Faenza and in Milton Keynes.”
He knows what makes Tsunoda tick, and he knows how good he can be when he has what he needs to perform.
Horner, on the other hand, had long been a doubter of the Japanese driver’s potential.
If Mekies can align the team to get the best from Tsunoda, he’ll unlock significant points and a major boost.
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THE STAFFING PROBLEM
A more interesting question is what changes Mekies will make to the team structure and key personnel.
The answer likely won’t come until later in the year, once he’s had time to appraise his squad and its weaknesses.
At the top of the list will be whether the team’s highest profile departures of recent years have been adequately covered.
Chief technical officer Adrian Newey hasn’t been directly replaced, with technical director Pierre Waché simply assuming seniority in the technical department.
The Verstappen camp reportedly has reservations about Waché’s leadership, particularly given the technical team said last year it had understood the car’s weaknesses only to serve up a package with similar problems this year. Verstappen himself has implied his technical feedback hasn’t always been acted upon.
Sporting director Jonathan Wheatley wasn’t directly replaced; instead Verstappen’s race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, absorbed some of his responsibilities alongside former senior strategy engineer Steve Knowles.
Horner said at the time it was testament to the team’s depth that it had several staff who could adopt key tasks.
But sporting director is a key role, managing not only trackside operations but representing the team before the stewards and in regulatory matters.
Mekies, a former sporting director, will know well whether the multi-person structure is working well and whether a full-time replacement is needed.
There’s also the pending departure of strategy chief Will Courtenay, who has been signed to McLaren as sporting director. His poaching was announced last September, but Red Bull Racing appears intent on keeping him until sometime next season.
The unusualness of keeping a senior strategist on active duty after already having signed for another team perhaps speaks to that team depth having been drained over a costly 18 months for the Milton Keynes personnel pool.
There have been many other lower profile but important departures. Ensuring the right people are in the right places will be critical to the new Mekies-led era.
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THE RED BULL POLITICS PROBLEM
All that comes before Mekies figures out exactly where he sits in this new Red Bull Racing structure.
He’s the team’s second boss after Horner. The team he inherits has for all intents and purposes been Horner’s team with Red Bull branding.
While Mekies has been vested with the same titles — team principal and CEO — he is not imbued with exactly the same authority.
Horner’s centrality is speculated as a key reason for Red Bull’s decision to give its team a new boss — one who doesn’t expect or assume the sort of autonomy the Englishman had been granted by company co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz.
That could be crucial to his success or failure.
Formula 1 teams work best when their decision-making structures are nimble and reflexive. Teams are slowed by having to constantly answer to owners.
Mateschitz understood this and trusted Horner, with motorsport adviser Helmut Marko, to make the decisions they needed to build a successful team. That structure won 14 world titles — eight of its 20 seasons have ended with at least one title.
Mekies runs the team, but he’s explicitly in thrall to the Red Bull executive, to Marko, and perhaps to some extent to Verstappen given the circumstances of his elevation. How much latitude he’s been allowed to make his own decisions is unclear.
And that’s without considering whether the political fault lines that brought the team to this point have been closed or left exposed.
On paper Horner was left friendless after the Yoovidhya family — Red Bull’s majority owner — abandoned him.
With the Austrian faction — Mateschitz’s son Mark, Red Bull chief executive Oliver Mintzlaff and motorsport adviser Marko — now seemingly aligned and allied with Verstappen’s management, peace should prevail.
But Verstappen is naturally self-interested, and Marko has survived at the team with the Dutchman’s explicit backing. How important will this be to Mekies’s principalship if Verstappen agitates for further changes or to leave in the next 12 months?
Will he have to fall into one camp or the other, or will he be able to keep his job while remaining neutral in any internal political skirmishes?
Mekies has been a senior leader in the Red Bull program for long enough now to understand how it works.
As Red Bull Racing boss he wields more power than ever before. But he’s also more exposed than he ever has been.
It’s one of the most scrutinised jobs in Formula 1, and the pressure starts now.