Laurent Mekies walked into Red Bull mid-season with the lights already on full glare. Christian Horner was out after two decades, the title fight was wobbling, and the team that had once looked untouchable couldn’t always find the sweet spot of its RB21. Mekies, fresh from the sister outfit at Faenza, called it what it was: a complete reset.
Promoted to CEO and team principal after the British Grand Prix, the Frenchman didn’t pretend it was business as usual. He’d spent 18 months shaping Racing Bulls alongside Peter Bayer, coming off a stint as Ferrari’s sporting director. Then the phone rang and the seat in Milton Keynes needed filling. Mekies didn’t try to lug the Faenza playbook in with him.
“I think you really have to make a conscious effort not to refer back to Racing Bulls because of how different the projects were,” he said at season’s end. “From Racing Bulls, there needed to be a complete reset.”
Red Bull certainly looked different by the time the paddock packed up in Abu Dhabi. Even if the big-ticket upgrades arriving after Mekies’ promotion had been signed off under Horner’s watch, the trajectory changed. The RB21 became predictable, the peaks easier to hit. Max Verstappen took the title fight to the wire, only to be edged by Lando Norris by two points. It was a near miss born out of a mid-year course correction.
Mekies keeps insisting his impact on that upturn was “minimal to zero,” and there’s a degree of savvy in that modesty. Step one, as he tells it, was about people and protection. “They’ve been extremely welcoming, extremely open-minded,” he said of the senior team. “I guess the job is to protect the group in such a way that they can concentrate on what they are so good at — having the technical discussions as the difficult ones, but doing it in an environment where you can have difficult discussions, because all we are seeking to achieve is to get the car faster.”
That culture point matters. Red Bull had speed on tap in the first half of the year, but the RB21’s operating window was narrow enough to bite. Understanding why became the mission. Instead of shutting the door on 2025 development to roll everything into the 2026 car, Mekies kept the spanners out on the current project — even if it meant robbing hours and budget from next year’s build.
“I think it became quite obvious to us that we didn’t want to simply turn the page and have the wishful thinking that, whilst the ’25 car had not been at the required level to fight for the title, we would then be okay doing so in ’26,” he explained. “We wanted to go to the root; we needed to get to the bottom of that project. We needed to understand why it’s not performing because, fundamentally, we’ll be using the same tools, the same process, the same methodologies next year. Yes, we may lose some time in doing so, but we didn’t want to go for the wishful thinking.”
It’s a pragmatic call that also reads like a vote of confidence — not just in the RB21, but in Red Bull’s methods and people. Correlation has been a thorn for this group at points over the last two years, and you don’t fix that by starting a new notebook and hoping the numbers behave. You fix it by grinding through the loop and finding out where simulation and reality diverge.
There’s also a touch of familiarity for Mekies at the sharp end. He referenced Ferrari as a closer comparison than Faenza in terms of scale, pressure, and the full chassis-engine ecosystem. But even then, he was careful to keep the rear-view mirror out of sight. No borrowed references, no nostalgia. Get to know the people. Learn the dynamics. Support what works.
The payoff? To be determined. Red Bull didn’t take the big trophy this time, and there’s no guarantee that pouring mileage into RB21 learnings translates cleanly to the new car and new rules. Mekies isn’t pretending otherwise. “Does it make us feel that the car is going to be faster or slower than the opposition? No, honestly, no,” he admitted. “But as a group — in the way we operate, in the way we accept the challenge, in the way we want to move forward — this is helpful, because it’s certainly giving us a lot of confirmation about the quality of our people.”
And that might be the real read on his half-season: a leader less interested in a signature stamp than in getting the machine humming again. He says his part was to keep the room clear for hard conversations and to make sure the fire stayed pointed at the stopwatch, not across the garage. On the evidence of the final third of 2025, that’s exactly where it burned. Now the question is whether Red Bull’s deliberate homework on the RB21 pays compound interest when the next car rolls out.
