Red Bull Racing is a team that has transformed to the point where next season should be considered the start of its second era in Formula 1. The question is, has it been reimagined and improved to meet the challenges of the next twenty years, or has the magic that made it so successful been lost?
When Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz lost his battle with cancer in October 2022, the company’s F1 business could never be the same again – at least not in the medium to long term. What was less clear is exactly what form this shift would take, but few expected it would be so extreme that, heading into 2026, all the key leadership figures that made the team great would be gone.
Mateschitz’s unique position meant that his absence inevitably brought about change. He owned 49% of Red Bull as a whole, while co-founder Chaleo Yoovidhya’s family owned the remaining 51%, but had management control over almost all of its operations. As an autocratic leader, his vision and enthusiasm fueled involvement in motorsports and helped build Red Bull into a company with a turnover of more than ten billion dollars after his death. And it has continued to grow ever since.
He had major influence in Formula 1 as he owned two teams – 20% of the grid – after being asked to save the ailing Minardi when Paul Stoddart could no longer keep it going and unexpectedly added a second team to his stable in September 2006. Yet the power he wielded belied the low profile he maintained. Mateschitz shunned day-to-day politics in the paddock and was by no means an autocrat in the interventionalist sense. For some, such influence is a status symbol to be flaunted; for Mateschitz it was a tool to be used only when necessary. For the rest he had his ‘vicars on earth’ to do the work.
He only occasionally made public statements, but when he did they had weight. A stop threat from Red Bull meant something and was not overused, giving him political power that was cleverly exercised and helped his team transform Grand Prix racing. Don’t underestimate how profound Red Bull’s effect was on the direction of Formula 1, especially when it came to testing the limits of – and ultimately breaking through – the well-intentioned but fragile cost containment efforts of the Resource Reduction Agreement and its successors.
After 2022, that dynamic became impossible. No longer Mateschitz’s pet project, it was now clearly part of a more conventional global enterprise. Writers of fiction and history throughout the ages are all too familiar with what the loss of such a center of power can mean for an ecosystem of this type that once benefited from such leadership and stability.
How did we get from there to Red Bull Racing, the fourth most successful team in Grand Prix history with 130 wins, which changed irrevocably with team principal Christian Horner, motorsport advisor Helmut Marko, technical supremo Adrian Newey and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley all gone? And how different is the ‘new’ Red Bull?
In essence, it’s more businesslike. While Mateschitz’s son Mark inherited his share and remains closely involved, the team now falls under the supervision of Oliver Mintzlaff, Red Bull’s CEO of Corporate Projects and New Investments. He has stood out at a number of Grand Prix this year following Horner’s departure in July, but also oversees Red Bull’s many other sporting activities, including football teams RB Leipzig in Germany, RB Salzburg in Austria and the New York Red Bulls. There is also a larger committee that is part of that management process.
Mintzlaff is an important player in the changes implemented. He recently spoke about “distractions,” or more accurately the desire to eliminate them, as a motivating factor. “It was an open secret that there were too many things going on in and around the team,” Mintzalff said earlier this month. He characterized the revival of form and the fact that Max Verstappen came within two points of winning the Drivers’ Championship as symptomatic of the renewed focus brought about by the changes. Horner, and the baggage he carried, was clearly considered a big part of this. However, Horner also had more power and control over Red Bull’s F1 empire than would ever sit well with the wider Red Bull company, so it would be naive to think that reining this in wasn’t part of the equation.
Laurent Mekies, appointed as CEO and team boss in Horner’s place, has the same job title, but not the same power. How could he, given that Horner had built the team and therefore woven himself into every aspect of its operations? Mekies is a razor-sharp engineer, intelligent, with a lot of management experience at Racing Bulls and Ferrari, where he was previously deputy team boss. However, he is more focused on the technical side, and although his role extends further, he is much more of a functionary compared to Horner. This isn’t meant as an insult to his abilities, just that the shackles of corporate life that Horner has shaken off, if he ever had them, are firmly clamped to him. It was Horner’s company, but Mekies is a company man and his power is limited.
Team leader Laurent Mekies is more focused on technology than his predecessor Christian Horner, but has much less political power. Kym Illman/Getty Images
The risk here is not just that Red Bull F1 – and remember that this now includes a full-fledged power unit manufacturer among the multiple companies that make it up – may no longer be the same political player. Horner was an experienced operator, someone with close relationships with all the key players and a few decades’ worth of battle wagons from various wars off the track. Mekies has kept a lower profile, and while he could still grow into that role, his job is more to keep his head down and keep the team working as best it can. There’s no chance that Mintzlaff will be able to do what Horner did politically, but he may have to do that at times if Red Bull’s more business-like approach doesn’t sufficiently empower those in day-to-day roles. He’s talked about the need to do that, but it’s one thing to talk the talk and another to actually make it happen.
The technical side of the team remains largely unchanged. Pierre Wache is leading the charge, and while Adrian Newey’s departure was a great loss caused in part by being, in his eyes, undervalued and marginalized, it was something that was happening even before Mateschitz’s death, even if the man himself didn’t realize it yet. The facilities remain top class, with the brand new, state-of-the-art wind tunnel due to open in 2026. It replaces a facility that, while well equipped, was too temperature sensitive because its structure was, as Horner put it, “a relic of the Cold War.”
There have also been staff changes in the garage, the latest being Max Verstappen’s old racing engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, who is set to move into a different role. But although steps like Wheatley join Sauber as team boss, ironically partly because he did not see the career opportunities within Red Bull as a loss, the team continues to perform well on the track. The main question is whether that could worsen over time, and to what extent the ’25 car problems were exacerbated by setup approaches that would never work or an over-reliance on simulation tools that prepared such directions.
Marko’s departure is the clearest signal of the shift towards greater corporate responsibility. His baseless claim that Kimi Antonelli deliberately let Lando Norris pass him at the Qatar Grand Prix, prompting social media abuse, was certainly the final straw for his departure, but realistically it would have happened without it. His way of working was not in line with the expectations of the modern world, and it is clear that there were aspects of his way of working that were not perceived as in line with Red Bull as a whole.
But don’t be fooled by the way it was presented: it was about Marko being forced to leave and not, as the press release claimed, his idea. The level of autonomy he was used to, and in many ways used well, given how crucial he was to Red Bull in turning a team that wasn’t taken seriously into one that dominated, simply couldn’t continue. The problem is that while Red Bull had a lot of negatives, it also lost the positives it brought.
The other question is: what will become of Racing Bulls? Despite the much-vaunted but terribly executed rebranding that took place in early 2024, which included Visa and CashApp in the name, it remains a second-tier F1 team. Despite the rhetoric in recent years that it is becoming less of a junior team, it can only be the second team. It has moved much of its design and aerodynamic testing from a creaky and underpowered facility to its own part of the Red Bull campus in Milton Keynes, a city just over 50 miles northwest of London. This has led to improved facilities, while the rest of the team continues to operate from Faenza in Italy, just around the corner from Imola.
The logical move is to sell it. F1 team valuations are skyrocketing at the moment, and there’s no shortage of vultures circling in the hope of acquiring one. Even a smaller team, dependent on purchasing key parts from Red Bull Racing, would probably go for a price in the billions today. Not only would it make sense for Red Bull to cash in on this, but it would also be good for F1 as a whole, as having two teams owned by the same entity competing against each other in any sport is bad for sporting integrity. How that would work is another question, but in the long term it would likely result in the team being moved back from Milton Keynes. However, it would be a surprise if the team remains part of Red Bull’s portfolio indefinitely.
The clean sheet of paper of 2026 is the first opportunity to evaluate this new Red Bull. Designed entirely in a post-Adrian Newey era, the car has been driven by the new regime from the start, albeit with a few hangovers, such as the muddled driver development strategy that saw Isack Hadjar deployed to Racing Bulls after one impressive season. If it starts well, there will be a period of stability, but if it starts badly, the rumors about a distrustful Verstappen have the opposite effect.
In many ways this is a new era for Red Bull. The central question underlying whether it is able to repeat the glory of the past twenty years in the decades to come will be whether Red Bull itself fully embraces the fact that if you want an F1 team to be successful, you shouldn’t let it run completely free, but keep it on a long, loose leash.
F1 history tells us that excessive corporate oversight and winning are mutually exclusive.
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