In a paddock that can turn a throwaway line into a week-long briefing war, Laurent Mekies and Zak Brown have quietly chosen the unfashionable option: picking up the phone and ending the noise.
Their Miami Grand Prix weekend featured a brief but pointed “ping-pong” over Gianpiero Lambiase — Red Bull’s long-time race operations pillar and Max Verstappen’s trusted voice on the radio — and what his McLaren future actually looks like. Both men said enough in front of the microphones to invite the usual escalation. Instead, they’ve moved to shut it down.
“We talk very often with Zak and with my other colleagues,” Mekies said after Brown was spotted stopping by Red Bull’s hospitality in Miami. “Certainly none of us wanted to go into a ping-pong about it, and we had a good chat about it, like we always do, and we move on.”
The spark for the back-and-forth was Mekies’ own framing of Lambiase’s next chapter. Lambiase — ‘GP’ inside Red Bull — is set to take up a new chief racing officer role at McLaren no later than 2028. Mekies suggested the move is the kind of career shift that changes how people are perceived in the pitlane, implying Lambiase is heading for the top job.
“GP had an extraordinary opportunity,” Mekies said. “You know he’s going to be a team principal there. It’s not something that I can do anything else than wishing him well.”
That was always going to land with a thud at McLaren, because Brown has already been batting away the idea that Lambiase’s appointment is a prelude to replacing team principal Andrea Stella. Brown’s response in Miami had the dry edge you’d expect: Mekies “knows something I don’t”.
Brown also aired a more practical point — that it could get awkward if Lambiase remains embedded in Red Bull’s race team while his next employer is already confirmed. In most teams, that’s exactly where the tension starts: how long a key operator can be fully “in” when everybody knows he’s on the way out.
Mekies’ counter is that there’s time. And in this case, time is the whole story. Red Bull’s position is that Lambiase will see out his contract, meaning McLaren could be waiting until 2028 to actually get him in the building. Whether that ends up being the final timeline or not, it’s clear Red Bull aren’t approaching this like a soft, sentimental farewell tour. If anything, they’re treating it as a standard business reality — and they want it to look that way publicly, too.
Miami’s mini-spat also exposed something else: how sensitive the modern pitlane has become to the optics of recruitment and succession. Brown is one of the sport’s most outspoken executives, Mekies is far more measured, and yet both understand the same truth: once you start litigating a senior hire through the media, you don’t just create headlines — you create pressure inside your own organisation.
For McLaren, the Lambiase appointment is a statement of intent: grab an elite, race-day operator and build a structure around winning more often. For Red Bull, it’s another reminder that the squad which dominated the previous era has been gradually losing familiar names.
Mekies didn’t pretend otherwise. He acknowledged the steady departure of senior figures in recent years — Christian Horner, Helmut Marko, Jonathan Wheatley, Adrian Newey and Rob Marshall among them — but leaned hard on the idea that Red Bull’s strength is now institutional rather than individual.
They’ve already made moves that fit that narrative. Red Bull confirmed Ben Waterhouse’s promotion to head of performance engineering, reporting to technical director Pierre Wache, and Andrea Landi is set to join as head of performance on 1 July from Racing Bulls.
Mekies, asked about life after Lambiase, went for a laugh before returning to the wider point.
“In terms of replacing GP, we have a couple of years to think about it,” he joked. “But jokes aside, we are quite proud.
“We don’t want to be defensive about the fact that we lost some talents. It’s a fact, and it’s been there for three or four years.”
The line that matters is what comes next: Red Bull see retention and development as “the highest priority”, and they’re framing their response as a mix of internal promotions and selective external hiring — not a panic buy of star names for the sake of it.
“We feel we have the best talent already, department per department,” Mekies said, pointing to Waterhouse on the power unit side and Wache on the chassis side. “When we can, we will always try to see how we can promote internally… If and when we need to go and get a specific set of skills or experience from some of our dear competitors around the pit lane, we will do it.”
That’s the subtext beneath the Miami détente: the Lambiase situation isn’t just about one person’s job title, or whether a CEO and a team boss traded barbs in the sunshine. It’s about how two top teams manage the increasingly political business of people — and how quickly the sport pounces when a senior move looks like it might change the balance of power.
For now, at least, Mekies and Brown have agreed not to feed it. In 2026’s F1 paddock, that might be the most surprising development of all.
