Zak Brown didn’t need to name names to spell out the problem Red Bull may soon have on its hands — but he did anyway.
With Gianpiero Lambiase now committed to joining McLaren as chief racing officer no later than 2028, the McLaren Racing CEO has effectively warned Red Bull that the awkward phase is baked into the deal. Not because anyone’s done anything underhand, Brown insists, but because modern F1 doesn’t leave much room for comfortable goodbyes when a senior operator has a future seat reserved at a direct rival.
Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has been clear that Lambiase isn’t going anywhere in the short term. Speaking to Sky F1, Mekies said: “We have ‘GP’ with us for the next two years,” underlining that Milton Keynes expects him to remain in place through the immediate cycle. That, naturally, raised the obvious follow-up: does McLaren genuinely think it can accelerate the timeline and get him in the building earlier than 2028?
Brown’s answer was less about McLaren pushing and more about Red Bull eventually flinching.
“We know how this game works,” Brown said. “At some point, it’ll be probably uncomfortable having someone that you know is going to a rival team.”
That’s the key word: uncomfortable. Not illegal, not scandalous — just the kind of quiet tension that creeps into an organisation once everyone knows the end date. Lambiase has been central to Red Bull’s competitive machine since arriving in 2015, best known to the public as Max Verstappen’s long-time race engineer, but in reality valued for far more than radio calls. In a sport where the smallest process advantage gets weaponised, having a senior figure with a signed future elsewhere introduces a constant question in the background: who gets looped in, and who doesn’t?
Brown, in typical fashion, framed it as business rather than betrayal.
“My general view is, if someone wants to move on, you need to do it in a measured way,” he said. “But if someone doesn’t want to be at my team anymore, I’ve never been one that feels like people steal people from each other, drivers, sponsors, you lose them or they have interest in something else.”
McLaren, he added, is prepared to wait. “So, ’28 is when his contract is through. We’ll wait, if that’s what’s necessary. If there’s something to be done earlier, then, of course, we’d be interested. But I think right now, we’re all stuck into ’26.”
That last line matters in 2026. With the new era looming and everyone still in the early phase of their current plans, there’s a natural inclination to keep the group stable, keep the noise down, and just get on with the season. Brown’s point is that stability gets harder the closer you get to the handover — and that Red Bull will eventually have to decide how much of its inner workings it’s comfortable exposing to someone who, however professional, will soon be paid to make McLaren faster.
Asked directly about the need for “firewalls” — the practical restrictions teams put in place to limit sensitive information leaking across the divide — Brown didn’t pretend it’s anything other than messy.
“Yeah. It makes things uncomfortable, right,” he said, before pointing to the most obvious modern comparison: Lewis Hamilton’s early-announced move to Ferrari and the inevitable tightening of information flows that followed.
“When Sir Lewis went to Ferrari, announced it early, at some point, Mercedes starts, understandably, cutting off knowledge that he might have,” Brown said. “And that’s just how the business works.”
The Hamilton example is telling because it highlights the human side of these moves. Teams rarely question the integrity of the person leaving; they question the risk. And risk management in F1 often looks blunt from the outside: fewer meetings, narrower briefings, fewer long-term development discussions, less exposure to the stuff you’d rather not see across the garage in 18 months’ time.
Brown isn’t accusing Red Bull of needing to do anything drastic tomorrow, and he isn’t pretending McLaren has a crowbar ready. But he is, very publicly, planting the idea that a long goodbye doesn’t stay friendly forever — and that Red Bull may, at some stage, conclude it’s better to let Lambiase go earlier than spend a year tiptoeing around what he can and can’t know.
For McLaren, the bigger picture is obvious. Lambiase will report to team principal Andrea Stella once he arrives, and his appointment fits the direction of travel: tightening the operational spine, sharpening race execution, and building a leadership layer that can sustain performance rather than flash it occasionally. For Red Bull, it’s a different kind of test — not of pace, but of control. The sport’s most ruthlessly efficient teams tend to be the ones that manage transitions cleanly, without allowing uncertainty to infect the working group.
Brown summed it up with a shrug and a deadline that’s still comfortably distant — for now.
“We’ll see how it plays out,” he said. “We’ve got time. We know we’re all settled for ’26, so we’ll chat about it when the time’s right.”
