Laurent Mekies left the British Grand Prix in July as team principal of Racing Bulls, focused on strengthening his midlevel team. Just days later, he was in the garage of Red Bull, one of the most powerful teams on the grid, as its new team principal and chief executive.
“I found a winning team, a team that has been winning more than anyone else in the last 20 years,” Mekies said in an interview in October. “By joining the team, it’s like you get the chance to go behind the door and discover the magic, and the magic is it’s a team that is fueled by pure racing in every single corner of the company.”
Mekies, 48, first saw Formula 1 on TV as a child in his native France and was hooked. He studied automotive engineering, had an internship in Formula 3 and then joined Formula 1 via Peugeot’s engine program in 2001.
“I was simply a little car fan, like many, many kids,” he said. “When you watch it on TV, Formula 1 feels extremely far away, because it feels completely inaccessible. I’ve only done motor racing in my life, so I feel extremely privileged to effectively be paid for what is a hobby!”
In 2003 Mekies joined Minardi, which in 2005 was bought by Red Bull and renamed Toro Rosso. He was part of the team when Sebastian Vettel won the 2008 Italian Grand Prix, the first win for a team owned by Red Bull.
“Unbelievable. It was completely unexpected,” Mekies said. “It was a completely unusual position for us to be in.”
Mekies embarked on a stint as the safety director with the sport’s governing body, the F.I.A., in 2014 and stayed until 2018, before joining Ferrari, rising to deputy team principal and sporting director. He returned to Toro Rosso, now called Racing Bulls, as its team principal in 2024.
At Red Bull, the affable Mekies replaced Christian Horner, who was let go after two decades at the helm. Under Horner, Red Bull rose to become a Formula 1 powerhouse, and the hands-on Mekies has been conscious of that situation. Red Bull is third in this year’s constructors’ championship.
“You cannot come in a team like that with a preconceived idea of what needs to be done,” he said. “You do need to take the time to actually understand: What is this team, how are people working? What are the dynamics?”
Mekies has been strong on maximizing the human element of the team.
“You realize that you have an insane amount of talent, that you have that pure racing spirit,” Mekies said. “As team principal you try to put your people in the best possible conditions so that their talent is expressed best, and you try to get the best people, to complete the puzzle. Everything is done by the people.
You could talk about process. You could talk about infrastructure, but the reality is all of that is done by your people. Call it culture, that allows each person individually and collectively to express themselves the best way. This project is about people, it’s about culture, so the rest is a consequence.”
Despite that focus, Red Bull insiders have highlighted Mekies’ technical skill as instrumental in leading Red Bull’s fight back after a midseason dip, including listening more to the feedback of drivers.
“He helped me on a lot of things, especially on the setup, we did what I did at Racing Bulls — Laurent gives us the engineering side,” Yuki Tsunoda of Red Bull, who worked with Mekies at Racing Bulls, said. “As a relationship side it’s always good, it’s literally like I had in Racing Bulls, it’s exactly the same, just the team uniform is different.”
Max Verstappen, who has won four world championships, made similar remarks about Bull’s improvements.
“With Laurent having an engineering background, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers — common-sense questions — so I think that works really well,” Verstappen said.
Mekies, who is too humble to accept credit for the team’s progress, has worked with several front-running drivers during his career, but it is Verstappen who is the class of the field in the current era.
“Like all of us, you could see how extraordinary he was in the car, and I guess the biggest surprise when you get to work with him, is to see that outside of the car he is even more incredible,” Mekies said.
“And this is what you don’t see from the outside. When you sit in the engineering office and you hear the debriefing and you see the level of sensitivity he has for the car, the level of feedback he’s able to give from the level of how he can describe what the car does, his own full immersion into motor sport like he lives day and night for motor sport, e-gaming, all the other things, he has built an unmatched understanding of car dynamics, race dynamics, and he plugs that with an extreme sensitivity.
Plus the speed. So the combination is insane. Quite often with a driver like Max, you realize that he is your best sensor in the car.”
While Mekies was instrumental in the decision to continue developing Red Bull’s 2025 car later than its rivals, the regulatory overhaul of the cars looms for next year.
Formula 1’s 2025 season concludes this weekend, but Red Bull will start 2026 at an event in Detroit, on Jan. 15, in conjunction with Ford, with whom its new Red Bull Powertrains division has been working. On-track testing begins on Jan. 26, in Barcelona.
“I think it is a crazy challenge, I think it’s very much a Red Bull challenge,” Mekies said about Red Bull becoming an engine builder.
“You open an engine program against people that have been doing it for 90 years. Maybe only Red Bull can do the crazy stuff like that. And of course, we are extremely respectful of the competitions and we know how huge the mountains we have to climb. But there is no more exciting challenge than this one.”
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