Red Bull arrived at the 2026 reset talking like a team that had survived its turbulence and kept its edge. Three races in, it looks more like an organisation still finding out what it’s become — and whether it can do that quickly enough to stop its most valuable asset from wondering why he’s still there.
Laurent Mekies is the public face of that transition. He’s personable, calm, and notably uninterested in the sort of internal theatre that consumed the final stretch of Christian Horner’s reign. But the job in front of him isn’t “steady the ship” in the old Red Bull sense. It’s closer to rebuilding the ship while the fleet sails away.
The premise that 2026 would be a clean break was always true in technical terms. The old regulation cycle is gone; so are the patterns, habits and shortcuts that connected the end of 2025 to the start of 2022. What’s become painfully clear is that Red Bull’s break wasn’t limited to a rulebook change. The team has spent three years shedding senior figures who didn’t just do important jobs — they held the institutional memory together.
Rob Marshall and Jonathan Wheatley went first, then Adrian Newey. In 2025, Horner and Helmut Marko followed, and by early 2026 Will Courtenay had also left after serving out his notice ahead of a move to McLaren. Those names mattered not merely because of what they did day-to-day, but because they created continuity across two eras of domination. Many of them had been together since the Jaguar purchase days. That sort of long-standing alignment is hard to measure until it’s gone.
Mekies, in other words, has inherited something that’s simultaneously still “Red Bull” by branding and budget, yet increasingly unfamiliar in its internal wiring. He’s also operating under a markedly different power structure. Where Horner was effectively given autonomy under Dietrich Mateschitz, Mekies reports into a parent company that’s now visibly hands-on, with Oliver Mintzlaff central to that oversight and with Red Bull GmbH taking back marketing control that had previously sat with the race team.
That change might be neat on an org chart, but it can be messy in a factory full of racers. Several departures since the end of 2025 hint at a staff body that hasn’t universally embraced the new mood. Chief designer Craig Skinner has moved on. GianPiero Lambiase has chosen to leave Verstappen’s side of the garage after a decade, chasing a new opportunity at McLaren by 2028. Front-end mechanic Ole Schack has resigned after never missing a race since the start of 2005. The Caller twins have also split — Matt to Audi, Jon’s next step unclear.
Team sources have indicated multiple mechanics have either left or handed in their notice, pointing to an atmosphere change since Horner’s axing and a sense that concerns were “railroaded over”. None of this is unusual in isolation — staff moves are the sport’s currency — but the volume and clustering matter. When you strip experience from the trackside group while simultaneously asking the factory to interpret a brand-new car concept, you create gaps that don’t show up on a spreadsheet until Sunday afternoon.
And Sunday afternoons, right now, are where Red Bull’s problem is impossible to dress up.
The RB22 is the first Red Bull since 2005 to carry none of Newey’s influence, with Pierre Waché now leading technically. Through the opening three races, the car hasn’t looked like a front-runner having an off weekend; it’s looked like an upper-midfield machine that occasionally remembers it has a champion driving it.
Even within the team, the tone has shifted from defiant to mildly baffled. Mekies has spoken openly about Red Bull “scratching its head” as the competitive picture worsened from Melbourne to China and remained bleak in Japan. The language is telling: not “we need to optimise”, but “we are wrestling with something” — and crucially, it’s not being framed as a simple set-up miss.
Isack Hadjar’s post-Suzuka summary was blunter. The power unit, he said, is good. The chassis, in his view, is “terrible” in the corners. That’s a brutal thing to admit this early in a rules cycle because it implies the limitation isn’t a small misunderstanding but something deeper in the car’s characteristics — the kind of issue that can swallow months while you chase correlation, and which tends to create panic once you realise your rivals are developing from a healthier baseline.
Ironically, the power unit side is where Red Bull can point to a genuine win. The Red Bull Powertrains project — conceived and driven under Horner — has produced a unit that’s regarded as potent and competitive, to the point that it’s thought to be the only non-Mercedes power unit not in line for any ADUO assistance at this stage. For a first-time effort from a non-automotive manufacturer, that’s significant. It also sharpens the frustration: the engine appears to be holding up its end of the bargain, while the car around it isn’t.
This is where the Verstappen question stops being tabloid bait and becomes strategic reality. Red Bull is no longer selling a romantic idea of a long climb; it’s trying to retain a driver who’s already lived through the peak. The reporting suggests Verstappen could be contractually able to leave after 2026 if he’s outside the top two in the Drivers’ Championship by the summer break, should he wish to. With podiums currently looking like a stretch rather than an expectation, the danger isn’t just that Verstappen can leave — it’s that the paddock will spend the entire season acting like he might.
Mercedes and McLaren don’t have to do much to “turn his head”. They simply have to keep being faster, look stable, and let the numbers do the talking.
Red Bull will argue — with some justification — that it has tools coming. Continued development of the RB21 late last season will have fed correlation work. A new wind tunnel is on the horizon, though realistically it’s 2028 before that delivers meaningful performance. The 2026 aero testing restrictions reset should also hand Red Bull more wind tunnel time than McLaren and Mercedes. But time and resource aren’t the same as clarity, and this grid doesn’t wait for anyone to find themselves.
There’s a wider consequence here, too. If Verstappen decides the project no longer matches his career timeline, Red Bull risks losing the final piece of “winning DNA” at the very top of the operation — the driver who turned good cars into great results, and who masked small weaknesses before they became obvious. Lose him now, and Red Bull’s “post-Horner” era becomes a genuine restart rather than a transition.
Mekies has been careful not to claim credit for last year’s late upturn, and equally careful not to throw anyone under the bus now. That’s commendable, and it may help settle an environment that’s been through enough. But Red Bull’s immediate problem isn’t vibes. It’s lap time — and the uncomfortable sense that a team which once made reinvention look effortless is having to relearn how to do it under a very different kind of leadership.
