Red Bull has effectively put a date stamp on one of the more intriguing paddock moves of this era: Gianpiero Lambiase will leave the team in 2028, when his current contract expires, to join McLaren. Not next season, not in a hush-hush gardening-leave fog — but on a clearly defined timeline that gives everyone two full years to live with the consequences.
The Milton Keynes statement was blunt: Lambiase is gone in 2028. McLaren’s confirmation was equally specific, naming him as Chief Racing Officer and placing him squarely under team principal Andrea Stella. In other words, this isn’t a romantic “come save us” hire; it’s a structural one. McLaren already has the role on its org chart — Stella has simply been doubling up on the responsibilities while also doing the broader team principal brief.
And that, more than any soap-opera chatter about who’s sitting in which office, is the real tell.
McLaren’s current competitive position has forced the team to professionalise at the sharp end. When you’re winning, you don’t want the team principal also having to be the person micromanaging race operations, the pit wall rhythm, the internal feedback loops, and the weekly post-mortems that keep performance from quietly leaking away. Those are different muscles. Stella has been using all of them.
Zak Brown has been refreshingly candid about that workload. He’s framed Lambiase’s arrival not as a coup against Stella but as a way to stop asking one man to do three jobs at once — team principal, race team leader, and a quasi-technical director influence alongside Peter Prodromou. Brown’s argument is simple: modern F1 teams are too big for that to be sustainable, even if the person doing it is exceptionally good.
There’s also a very obvious subtext: McLaren is planning for continuity, not upheaval. Brown wasn’t having the suggestion that Stella is being lined up for replacement, and he didn’t bother dressing it up. Shown a clip of Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies suggesting Lambiase is “going to be a team principal” at McLaren, Brown fired back with a dry line: Mekies “knows something I don’t.”
It landed because it was true to the reality of how top teams now operate. The fashionable assumption is that any big-name pit wall signing is a succession plan. But the smarter read is that McLaren is doing what the best-run organisations do: adding senior specialists so the system holds up under pressure — and under success.
Still, Mekies’ comment wasn’t careless. It’s exactly the kind of line that gets repeated because it has just enough plausibility to be dangerous. Lambiase has been one of the most visible engineers in the sport across the Max Verstappen era at Red Bull, and visibility often gets mistaken for inevitability. “Team principal” is also the easiest shorthand in a paddock conversation for “senior leadership figure who’ll run big pieces of the operation.”
McLaren’s press release, though, is clear about reporting lines: Chief Racing Officer, reporting to Stella. If there’s a future beyond that, it’s not something anyone at Woking is selling publicly — and Brown, in particular, sounded more like a CEO protecting an effective leadership duo than a man preparing to reshuffle the top desk.
The more interesting part is why Red Bull chose to confirm the timing so early. Announcing a departure two years in advance isn’t common, and it creates a long runway of awkwardness if you let it. Yet it also removes uncertainty internally and externally. Red Bull can plan its succession in a controlled way, while Lambiase finishes the job without the weekly speculation of “is he leaving next month?” hanging over every radio exchange and every strategy call.
For McLaren, the long lead time is a luxury. It allows Stella and the current race operations group to map out exactly what they want the Chief Racing Officer role to look like when Lambiase arrives — and what they want Stella to stop doing by then. That’s the kind of organisational tightening you do when you’re serious about staying on top, not just reaching it.
Brown’s broader point — that his job is to “get the best talent” long-term, whether that’s a driver, engineer or strategist — is also telling. This isn’t framed as a reactive move, but as an investment in the pit wall as a competitive differentiator. In the tight margins of modern F1, that’s not marketing speak. It’s how races get won when everyone has similar levels of raw car performance.
So yes, the paddock will keep whispering about titles and future promotions, because it always does when a famous name changes colours. But the story here isn’t about a hostile takeover of Stella’s job. It’s about McLaren trying to future-proof the busiest part of its operation — and about Red Bull accepting that one of its most high-profile figures will eventually be wearing papaya.
Two years is a long time in Formula 1. It’s also exactly the kind of timeline you choose when you want this to be a transition, not a rupture.
