Formula 1 · Feature

Red Bull’s Year Without Horner: What Mekies Actually Changed — and What He Didn’t

One year ago, Red Bull sacked the only team boss it had ever known. Laurent Mekies inherited the shellshock, kept the structure, and now faces the exact problem that defined his predecessor’s final year: keeping Max Verstappen.

On July 9, 2025, Formula 1’s most durable dynasty ended in a morning staff meeting. Christian Horner — the only team principal Red Bull Racing had ever had, architect of eight drivers’ titles and six constructors’ championships across two eras of dominance — was dismissed after more than twenty years, the culmination of a protracted political battle that had simmered since Dietrich Mateschitz’s death in 2022 and boiled over through a bruising conduct scandal, high-profile departures and mounting on-track struggles. Laurent Mekies was pulled across from Racing Bulls with barely time to catch his breath. One year on, speaking to The Race in an exclusive anniversary interview, the Frenchman has offered his most candid account yet of what he found, what he changed — and why the hardest part of the job looks remarkably like the one that consumed his predecessor.

The shock he walked into

Mekies is disarmingly honest about the state of the team he inherited. The dismissal blindsided the factory floor as much as the paddock, and his first task wasn’t technical or strategic — it was psychological.

It was unexpected for the team, unexpected obviously for me. I’m not going to lie. If you have somebody you know driving a company, like Christian has been for 20 years, it’s a big shock for the people. — Laurent Mekies, Red Bull Team Principal

What defused it, in his telling, was a shared and very simple focus: “People wanted to get the car back to [a place where Red Bull can] win, that’s the only thing that they were interested in.” The leadership change that could have fractured a 1,000-strong workforce instead channelled itself into the late-2025 recovery that saw Verstappen pushing McLaren to the season’s bitter end — a turnaround Mekies was at least partially credited with, thanks to a more engineering-led trackside approach that even Verstappen praised early on: “constantly asking the right questions to me, but also to the team.”

The revolution that never came

The most striking feature of the Mekies era, twelve months in, is how little he tore down. Horner’s dismissal stemmed from Red Bull’s Austrian parent wanting things run differently — a tighter corporate ship, rather than one figure holding total control of Milton Keynes — but the operational direction of the team has remained largely what it would have been under the old regime.

I’ve never felt I had to unpick things. The priority was really in front of the fact that you have to get into somebody else’s shoes. It was how can you meet the people and build your own picture as quickly as you can? — Laurent Mekies, Red Bull Team Principal

His conclusion after that listening exercise was that not much was broken: the talent was in place, no department needed urgent surgery, and his job was to give “the very best people in the world at what they do” whatever they needed to perform. It’s a quiet vindication of Horner’s structural legacy — even the in-house Red Bull Powertrains project now defining the team’s 2026 fortunes was, after all, the former boss’s brainchild.

The problems that transcend the boss

If the anniversary invites a verdict, the honest one is incomplete. The RB22 hasn’t been the platform Red Bull hoped for; the team is winless in 2026, Verstappen’s exit clause looms over the summer, and the past fortnight has piled on rear wing failures, an engine mystery and open driver frustration. Mekies doesn’t pretend otherwise — “Is Red Bull in the place that Mekies wants it to be? Certainly not” is the frank framing — but he refuses the obvious shelter of blaming a transition year or a debut engine.

We are not a team that hides behind excuses, so nobody does that. Pierre doesn’t do it, Ben doesn’t do it. None of our people do it, so I’m not going to do it. — Laurent Mekies, on technical chiefs Pierre Wache and Ben Hodgkinson

His case for optimism is structural rather than rhetorical: a power unit programme that “will develop into a further advantage” having survived year one, and a new windtunnel that addresses the team’s longest-standing infrastructure weakness. “These are the pillars of the future strength of the team,” he insists. “We certainly do not see them at all as an excuse for the present.”

The one genuine win, and the one unfinished job

Ironically, the clearest improvement of the post-Horner era is the one that plagued the old regime most visibly. After years of drivers being chewed up alongside Verstappen, Isack Hadjar has made the second seat his own — a podium in Monaco (later lost to penalty reshuffling), a stunning front-row-adjacent qualifying record, and at Silverstone a weekend in which he comprehensively out-performed his four-time champion teammate. Whether that’s Mekies’ doing, the great leveller of new regulations, or simply Hadjar’s own mental fortitude is debatable; that it has happened on his watch is not.

Which leaves the unfinished job — the same one Horner carried into his final summer. Verstappen’s performance clause is set to activate, his patience is publicly fraying, and his meeting with McLaren’s Zak Brown remains the paddock’s favourite subject. One year after the bombshell, the man in charge has changed, the structure has barely moved, and Red Bull’s defining question is untouched: build a car worthy of Max Verstappen, or watch the era end for good. As Horner himself could testify, that job description outlasts whoever holds it.

• Horner departed with eight drivers’ titles, six constructors’ crowns and all 124 of Red Bull’s wins to that point under his leadership.
• Mekies’ F1 career began in 2001 with engine supplier Asiatech, via Minardi, Toro Rosso, the FIA and Ferrari.
• Horner has since been linked with an ownership-led return, most prominently around Alpine’s minority stake.
• Red Bull’s next test comes immediately: Spa, July 17-19, with the ‘Macarena’ wing decision still pending.