Red Bull has time on its side — and it plans to use every last minute of it.
With Max Verstappen already a lock for one seat in 2026, the real intrigue sits everywhere else in the Red Bull orbit. Who partners Verstappen at the works team when the new rules hit? Who anchors Racing Bulls? And how much do the performances of a fast-improving rookie crop change the picture between now and Abu Dhabi?
Laurent Mekies isn’t about to be rushed into any of it. Speaking to Sky Sports F1, the Red Bull powerbroker made clear the group’s approach: patience, leverage and pressure applied in all the right places.
“We don’t feel in a rush,” he said. “Our drivers are under contract with us. We have all the cards. We are trying to give them the best possible conditions for them to make progress.”
The subtext was aimed squarely at Yuki Tsunoda, who’s had the unenviable job of measuring himself against Verstappen and is battling to defend his Red Bull future. The brief for Tsunoda is simple, if not easy: close the gap.
“We want that gap between the two drivers to be as close as possible,” Mekies added. “We need the points from Yuki… we try to give him enough time and space to get more comfortable with the car and to get closer to Max.”
That’s the carrot. The stick is the most loaded junior pipeline in the paddock.
Isack Hadjar has shoved his way into the conversation with an eye-catching rookie season, ticking off all the little tests that matter: racecraft, composure when the weekends get messy, pace when it counts. If the final third of his year looks like the middle third, the 20-year-old will be very hard to ignore for 2026.
Liam Lawson is right there too, quietly doing what he always does — speed without fuss — while reminding the top brass he can drop into a car and score. And then there’s Arvid Lindblad, who’s put together the kind of junior résumé that forces meetings. The teenager bagged the 2025 Formula Regional title and has already stacked up several Formula 2 wins as a rookie. Red Bull doesn’t do sentimentality, but it does do momentum. Lindblad has it.
All of which explains Mekies’ cool hand. The group can slow-play the market because it controls so many of the pieces. In driver terms, Red Bull’s contract web is a safety net and a weapon; if someone spikes, they can step up. If someone stumbles, there’s cover. And if the competitive order lurches under the 2026 regulations, the company can pivot late without being held hostage by the calendar.
That last bit matters. F1’s next ruleset will be the biggest reset since 2014, with new chassis concepts and hybrid power unit tweaks that could reshuffle strengths and expose weaknesses no simulator can fully predict right now. Committing early would be a nice headline; committing later might be wiser.
None of this guarantees Tsunoda’s seat or dooms it. It simply turns the remainder of 2025 into an extended audition across two garages. Tsunoda needs to turn qualifying flashes into relentless Sundays. Hadjar needs to keep graduating from “promising” to “inevitable.” Lawson must keep making himself the low-risk choice. Lindblad’s job is to make Red Bull wonder whether waiting another year would be a waste.
The only certainty is Verstappen. Everything else is fluid by design — and that’s exactly how Red Bull likes it.
