Red Bull Racing’s secret weapon? An engineer who treats workflows like lap times

Red Bull Racing’s secret weapon? An engineer who treats workflows like lap times

There’s a second backstage at Web Summit when a member of the manufacturing crew — simply twice the measurement of Laurent Mekies — wraps a beefy arm round the Oracle Red Bull Racing CEO’s shoulder and steers him towards the soundboard to retrieve his telephone for a selfie. Most executives main 2,000-person organizations would bristle at the informality, even from a superfan. Mekies instead smiles, his demeanor unchanged as he accommodates the starstruck crew member.

It’s a small second however maybe a revealing one about Mekies who, just 4 months in the past, grew to become only the second particular person to guide Red Bull Racing in its 20-year historical past.

“The first feeling is one of being privileged, being honored, to suddenly be part of such an incredible team,” Mekies later tells me onstage in French-accented English. “This team has been winning more than anyone else in Formula One in the last two decades. And then suddenly you are part of it.”

“Suddenly” shouldn’t be an overstatement. As widely reported, the wholly sudden name got here in July. Christian Horner, the outspoken government who had led Red Bull since its entry into F1 in 2005, was out. Mekies, who had been operating the team’s sister outfit, Racing Bulls, for just over a 12 months, was tapped to step up.

Mekies was an unbelievable alternative in some methods. Where Horner delights in the media highlight and gamesmanship that defines F1 team principals, Mekies spent a lot of his profession in the engineering trenches. His method to profitable displays that technical background, too; he sees performance good points not just in aerodynamics and tire compounds, however in eliminating friction from workflows and processes.

That philosophy extends to the team’s partnerships. Take 1Password, the cybersecurity company whose CEO, David Faugno, sits beside Mekies and me on the Web Summit stage. Faugno took over his personal iconic model 4 months in the past — the same week as Mekies.

The partnership between a cybersecurity company and an F1 team might sound like an odd match. Security, after all, normally means friction. Passwords to examine, programs to authenticate, workflows that slow people down. In F1, the place thousandths of a second matter, that’s unacceptable.

But that’s precisely why Mekies sees 1Password as integral to Red Bull’s competitive edge. “Our people have to manage and log in and log out of complex systems — aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics at the track, back at the factory, at the simulator, in the wind tunnel . . . We go today faster in this seamless login and logout of our people from one system to another than what we were doing without the security level.”

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It’s a small competitive benefit, however in F1, small benefits compound. “You are looking after the tiniest competitive advantage, one after the other,” Mekies notes. “Our tech genius, our people — they are challenging us every day about the noise that is somewhat unavoidable for a large team. With 1Password, we have this sort of answer where we reduce the noise, increase the time for the core business, and that’s fundamentally where the performance comes from.”

From engineer to CEO

At 48, Mekies has seen Formula 1 from practically every angle. After finding out at ESTACA, an engineering college in Paris, and Loughborough University in the U.Ok., he began in Formula 3 in 2000 before crossing into F1 with a British racing team called Arrows in 2001. He then joined Minardi, an Italian team, in 2003 as a race engineer. When Red Bull purchased the struggling outfit and reworked it into Toro Rosso in 2006 — the thought was to create a junior team to develop younger drivers like Max Verstappen for Red Bull Racing — Mekies was promoted to chief engineer.

Mekies stayed for eight years before shifting on to grow to be security director at the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the rulemaker for Formula 1 and other motorsport collection worldwide. There, he reportedly championed the titanium security device that’s mounted above the cockpit of Formula 1 vehicles to guard the driver’s head — the “halo” system. Then it was on to Ferrari as deputy race director, and 5 years later, again to Red Bull’s junior racing team (renamed Racing Bulls in 2024).

Mekies brings a breadth of experience to the position, in brief. What he doesn’t carry — not yet, a minimum of — is a number of ego. When Verstappen gained the 2025 Italian Grand Prix at Monza in September in what grew to become the quickest race in F1 historical past, reporters requested Mekies about his contribution to the victory. His reply was self-effacing: “I have zero contribution.” When the reporters laughed, he added, “I’m not kidding.”

When I ask about that second on stage at Web Summit, Mekies shrugs. “All we do as leaders is put our people in position to be able to express their talents. So it is very much their win.”

Mekies sees his position in another way than his high-profile predecessor, in fact. He isn’t intentionally attempting to “lead from behind.” Instead, he tells me onstage that he doesn’t “think the approach matters. I don’t think it’s leadership style. You will find every possible style in leadership. I think what matters in leadership is care for the people and a care-for-the-company culture.”

Indeed, while Mekies may definitely bathe consideration on his star driver (Mekies desires to retain him after all), he’s more centered on the collective. “Your first thoughts are for the 2,000 people back in the factories who have never given up on this season,” he says. “It takes a tremendous amount of energy, of company culture, to keep that motivation and that fighting spirit.”

Humility doesn’t imply playing it protected, by the method. The Monza win also validated a considerably stunning choice: to maintain pushing on the 2025 automotive slightly than abandoning it for next 12 months’s development. “We were not happy about where the car performance had been at the beginning of this year and up until the middle of this year,” Mekies tells me. “We decided to press on a bit more with 2025. We didn’t feel that we could simply turn the page and have wishful thinking about how everything will be better next year.”

It was a dangerous name. With utterly new rules coming in 2026 — new chassis guidelines, new energy unit rules — most groups had already shifted assets to next 12 months’s automotive. But Mekies felt his team wanted to grasp what had gone flawed before they might transfer ahead. “We felt we had to get to the bottom of what had not been working,” he says. “We perhaps pushed a bit more than some of the competition. And luckily, it gave us this turnaround in form.”

Now the team heads into winter with less development time than its rivals, “but with a lot more trust in our tools, in our methodologies, in our process,” Mekies says.

Driving ahead

If Mekies’ 2025 turnaround was dangerous, 2026 represents one thing else: a “crazy adventure,” as Mekies describes how Red Bull is constructing its personal energy unit for the first time, in partnership with Ford. (It has relied on Honda-based engines since 2019.) “For Oracle Red Bull Racing, there are no other words to describe next year other than as a crazy challenge. That’s how big it is for us.”

For a way of what the team is taking over, right here’s how Mekies describes it on stage: “We are going to do our own power unit with the support from Ford, and we are going to compete against people that have been manufacturing Formula One engines for more than 90 years. It’s the sort of crazy level that only Red Bull can do. We’ve decided to create overnight facilities in the middle of a field in Milton Keynes [a large town about 50 miles northwest of London] in the U.K. from zero — get the building, get the dynos in [which are massive, sophisticated test rigs], hire 600 people, try to get them to work together, eventually try to get an engine and get it up to speed to reach the track.”

Can he promise Verstappen a championship-winning automotive next 12 months? When I ask Mekies, he solutions straightaway. “We would be silly to think that we just go in there and are going to be at the right level straight away. This is not going to happen,” he says. “But we take it the Red Bull way. We take it with all the high-risk, high-gain approach that we cherish.”

He has cause for optimism. Sitting third in this 12 months’s F1 team standings, just behind Mercedes, Red Bull has a practical shot at overtaking them for second place in the final three races of this 12 months’s season. It’s a far cry from the dominance Red Bull loved lately, however given how the season began, it might signify a major recovery.

Backstage before our dialog, as make-up artists powder us for the stage lights, I ask Mekies about the strain of those final races. His reply is usually methodical.

“We always say that we take it race by race. So that’s what we are going to do in the next three races,” he tells me. “You want to turn up at the racetrack, put the car in the right window,” that means the slender vary of circumstances the place a automotive performs optimally, “and fight for the win.”

It’s “incredibly difficult to fight at that level,” he continues, “but everyone in Milton Keynes has been doing such a tremendous job to turn the car around and to give us a competitive package for the end of the season.”

In the meantime, he insists that he’s not taking a look at the factors tables or the what-ifs. “We don’t look at the numbers. We know there is a lot happening in the [F1 team standings], but we only look at it race by race.”

That’s the “only thing we do,” he says, describing Red Bull’s mission. “Chasing lap times.”

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