Andrea Stella isn’t pretending he hasn’t heard the noise. He’s just refusing to do Red Bull’s worrying for them.
With Max Verstappen’s name now being spoken around the paddock in the same breath as McLaren and 2027, the McLaren team principal was invited after the British Grand Prix to put himself in Laurent Mekies’ shoes and explain how he’d manage the prospect of losing the sport’s biggest driver. Stella’s answer was essentially: not my problem — and, in truth, he doesn’t have the spare headspace even if he wanted it.
“I have enough to do at McLaren to gain half a second in the shortest amount of time,” Stella said, before turning the conversation back to his own house. McLaren’s pace might have turned heads, but Stella made a point of highlighting that the early part of 2026 has still been littered with frustrations, from reliability hits across both the power unit and chassis sides to operational details he clearly isn’t letting slide.
“Still today, from an operational point of view, I’m here saying that we should stop Oscar [Piastri] one lap earlier and we would have saved some race time,” he said. It was a very Stella moment: even while being asked about the biggest driver-market story of the year, he couldn’t resist pulling on a thread that bothers him.
That matters because it hints at the posture McLaren has adopted internally. The team isn’t acting like a group waiting for a superstar to arrive and save them. It’s acting like one that sees margins everywhere — and believes those margins can be turned into performance quickly. In that context, Verstappen isn’t a distraction; he’s an opportunity that only makes sense if the team is already doing the basics ruthlessly well.
The Verstappen situation, though, is what gives the whole conversation its edge. Red Bull’s rough start to 2026 has left him only seventh in the standings after nine races, a position that suddenly carries contractual weight. He remains officially signed through the end of 2028, but it’s understood a performance clause allows him to walk if he’s lower than second in the championship at the summer break.
On the points picture as it stands, the maths is nasty for Red Bull. Verstappen trails George Russell — currently second — by 78 points, with a maximum of 50 available before the August shutdown. Unless something dramatic shifts, the clause is set to come into play.
Against that backdrop, it’s understood talks between Verstappen and McLaren are advanced over a move to Woking for 2027. And while driver-market rumours are usually padded with wishful thinking, there’s a sense this one has moved beyond pub talk into something more tangible — not least because McLaren has already secured a major piece of Verstappen’s trusted circle in the form of long-serving race engineer GianPiero Lambiase.
Lambiase has agreed to join McLaren in a wide-reaching role as chief racing officer, reporting directly to Stella, with his arrival pencilled in “no later” than 2028. That timeline doesn’t automatically align with a 2027 Verstappen switch, but it does underline a bigger point: McLaren’s recruitment drive isn’t random. It’s strategic, senior, and increasingly ambitious.
Still, Stella was careful not to be drawn into any theatre about Red Bull’s internal state. Asked directly what he’d do in Mekies’ position, he simply backed his opposite number to handle it.
“Laurent is very capable, very intelligent, very competent,” Stella said. “So I’m sure he will do everything that is necessary…”
It’s an interesting dynamic. Mekies, after all, is still relatively early in his Red Bull tenure at the top level, having taken over as Christian Horner’s successor last year. At Silverstone, Horner was back in the paddock for the first time since that change — an unavoidable visual reminder of how much has shifted in Milton Keynes in a short period.
Verstappen, for his part, has publicly tried to keep the temperature down. After the British Grand Prix he defended Mekies and pushed back against the idea that one figure should be taking the blame for a season that has slipped away early.
“Everyone is trying their best,” Verstappen said. “I’m not blaming one person or whatever. It’s just painful for everyone that this is happening.”
Mekies has also leaned into the idea that Red Bull’s strength remains its depth of talent. Speaking recently, he described the “amazing people” across the chassis and power unit groups as the standout feature of his first year in charge, while acknowledging the last 12 months have been intense — last year’s unexpected title fight, missing out by a tiny margin, then immediately rolling into the task of getting the first Red Bull Ford Powertrains unit over the line.
That’s the tension Red Bull now has to manage: the team can believe in its people and still face a cold contractual reality if Verstappen’s clause becomes active. And once it does, it’s not about convincing him you’re competent — it’s about convincing him you can win soon enough, in an era where drivers at the top don’t tend to gamble their primes on promises.
McLaren, meanwhile, gets to play this from the position Stella just outlined: focus on lap time, tighten operations, stop leaving points on the table. If Verstappen is genuinely on the market, the most persuasive argument won’t be a sales pitch. It’ll be a car and a pit wall that look like they’ve got their act together — because that’s what champions buy into.
Stella ended his answer with a diplomatic flourish, saying he hopes McLaren and Red Bull can “join Mercedes and Ferrari” to make the second half of the season more exciting. It sounded like a pleasantry. But in 2026, with Verstappen’s future hanging over the competitive order like a storm cloud, even the pleasantries come with subtext.
