The end of an era
Last July 9, three days after the British GP, Christian Horner’s era at Red Bull officially ended. After 20 years in the role of team principal, the British manager was shown the door and a few months later, at the end of the 2025 World Championship, the same fate befell the team’s long-time consultant, Helmut Marko. Within half a year, the two souls – often contrasting with each other, but nonetheless central – of the Red Bull F1 project were ousted. Now control of the team is in the hands of Laurent Mekies. The Frenchman, formerly of Racing Bulls, Ferrari and the FIA, has a leadership style very different from his predecessors.
Former Indian driver Karun Chandhok, a respected pundit for British TV, highlighted this to Sky UK. Chandhok emphasized how the departure of Horner and Marko almost simultaneously has changed the level of internal pressure at the Milton Keynes team, particularly lightening the tension that Isack Hadjar must now endure compared to those who have been Max Verstappen’s teammates in recent years.
New management
“It’s a very different team now that Christian Horner and Helmut Marko are gone – Chandhok observed – this is the first full year of the Mekies era at Red Bull and I think maybe it’s a less stressful environment now“. The driver carousel of recent years, with Perez, Lawson and Tsunoda alternating in the team’s second car, now seems to have ended.
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“Putting all that pressure on Liam Lawson, giving him two races to prove his worth behind the wheel, didn’t work – Chandhok emphasized – [something like that] will never work. So I hope, for Isack’s sake, that this situation continues. They don’t need him to beat Max. They need him to be a tenth or two behind Max and just make sure that, on a day when Max has a problem, or something happens, he is there. He just needs to be right behind him and so far he has been”, the former Indian driver concluded.
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