Red Bull Racing’s secret weapon? An engineer deals with workflow such as cycle times

There is a moment behind the scenes in Web Summit When a member of the production crew — easily twice the size of Laurent Mekies — wraps a chubby arm around the Oracle Red Bull Racing CEO’s shoulder and points him toward the soundboard to retrieve his phone for a selfie. Most executives leading 2,000-person organizations would resent informality, even from superfans. Mikis smiles instead, his demeanor unchanged as he takes in the flamboyant crew member.

It’s a small but perhaps revealing moment for Mikis, who just four months ago became the second person to drive for Red Bull Racing in its 20-year history.

“The first feeling is a feeling of privilege, of honor, of suddenly being part of this amazing team,” Mikis later told me onstage in French-accented English. “This team has won more than any other team in Formula 1 in the last two decades. Suddenly I am part of it.”

“Suddenly” is not an exaggeration. As widely reported, the most unexpected call came in July. Christian Horner, the outspoken CEO who has led Red Bull since its entry into Formula 1 in 2005, has exited his position. Mikis, who has been managing the team’s sister team, Racing Bulls, for just over a year, is set to step up.

Mekies was an unlikely choice in some ways. While Horner relishes the media spotlight and the skill that characterizes Formula 1 team managers, Mekes has spent most of his career in the engineering trenches. His winning style reflects that technical background as well; He sees performance gains not only in aerodynamics and tire compounds, but also in eliminating friction caused by workflow and processes.

This philosophy extends to team partnerships. Take 1Password, the cybersecurity company whose CEO, David Vagno, sits next to me and Mekies on the Web Summit stage. Faugno took over his iconic brand four months ago, the same week as Mekies.

A partnership between a cybersecurity company and a Formula 1 team may seem strange. Security, after all, usually means friction. Passwords that need to be verified, systems that need to be authenticated, and workflows that slow people down. In Formula One, where it is a thousandth of Article 2, this is unacceptable.

But that’s exactly why Mekies sees 1Password as integral to Red Bull’s competitive advantage. “Our employees have to manage complex systems and log in and out of them – aerodynamics, car dynamics on the track, back at the factory, in the simulator, in the wind tunnel… We are faster today at smoothly logging in and out of our employees from one system to another than we did without security.”

It’s a small competitive advantage, but in F1, small advantages add up. “You’re looking for the smallest competitive advantage, one at a time,” Mikis points out. “Our technology genius, our people — they challenge us every day about the noise that is somewhat unavoidable for a large team. With 1Password, we have that kind of answer where we reduce the noise, increase the time for the core business, and that’s the foundation where performance comes from.”

From engineer to CEO

At 48 years old, Mickies has witnessed Formula 1 from almost every angle. After studying at ESTACA, an engineering school in Paris, and Loughborough University in the UK, he started in Formula 3 in 2000 before moving to Formula 1 with a British racing team called Arrows in 2001. He then joined the Italian team Minardi in 2003 as a race engineer. When Red Bull bought the struggling team and turned it into Toro Rosso in 2006 – the idea being to create a small team to develop young drivers like Max Verstappen for Red Bull Racing – Mekes was promoted to chief engineer.

Mekes stayed for eight years before moving on to become director of safety at the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the rules maker for Formula 1 and other motorsport series around the world. There, he is said to have championed the titanium safety device mounted above the cockpit of Formula 1 cars to protect the driver’s head – the “halo” system. He then moved to Ferrari as deputy racing director, and after five years, returned to the Red Bull junior racing team (renamed Racing Bulls in 2024).

Mekies brings a wide range of experience to the role in brief. What it hasn’t brought – so far, at least – is a lot of ego. When Verstappen won the 2025 Italian Grand Prix at Monza in September in what became the fastest race in Formula 1 history, journalists asked Mekes about his contribution to the win. His answer was grim: “I have no input.” When reporters laughed, he added: “I’m not kidding.”

When I asked about that moment on stage at Web Summit, Mikis shrugged. “All we do as leaders is put our people in a position to express their talents. So this is very much a win for them.”

In fact, Mikis sees his role differently from his prominent predecessor. He is not deliberately trying to “lead from behind.” Instead, he told me on stage, “I don’t think approach matters. I don’t think it’s leadership style. You’ll find every possible style in leadership. I think what matters in leadership is caring for people and a caring culture of the company.”

In fact, while Mekes can certainly turn attention to his star driver (Mekes wants to keep him after all), he is more focused on the team. “Your first thoughts are to the 2,000 people who are back in the factories and have never given up on this season,” he says. “It takes a tremendous amount of energy, and company culture, to maintain that drive and that fighting spirit.”

By the way, modesty does not mean playing it safe. The Monza win also validated a somewhat surprising decision: to continue pushing the 2025 car rather than abandon it for next year’s development. “We weren’t happy with the car’s performance at the beginning of this year and into the middle of this year,” Lee Meeks tells me. “We decided to move a little further into 2025. We didn’t feel like we could simply turn the page and think wishfully about how everything would be better next year.”

It was a risky call. With completely new regulations coming in 2026 – new chassis rules, new power unit regulations – most teams have already diverted resources into next year’s car. But Meeks felt his team needed to understand what went wrong before they could move forward. “We felt like we had to get to the bottom of what wasn’t working,” he says. “We probably put in a little bit more effort than some of the competitors. Fortunately, it gave us a turnaround in form.”

Now the team heads into the winter with less development time than its competitors, “but with more confidence in our tools, in our methodologies, and in our process,” says Mikis.

Driving forward

If Mekes’ 2025 turnaround is risky, 2026 represents something else: “a crazy adventure,” as Mekes describes how Red Bull is building its own power 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 than crazy challenge. That’s how big the challenge is for us.”

To get a sense of what the team is dealing with, here’s how Mikis describes it on stage: “We’ll be creating our own power unit with the backing of Ford, and we’ll be competing against people who have been building Formula 1 engines for over 90 years. It’s the kind of crazy level that only Red Bull can do. We decided to build overnight facilities in the middle of a field in Milton Keynes (a large city about 50 miles northwest of London) in the UK from scratch – get the building, insert the dynos (which are test rigs) Huge and sophisticated), he hired 600 people, tried to get them to work together, and eventually tried to get an engine up and revving it up the track.

Can he promise Verstappen a championship-winning car next year? When I ask Mikis, he answers immediately. “It would be silly to think we’ll get there and get it right right away,” he says. “That’s not going to happen.” “But we’re approaching it the Red Bull way. We’re approaching it with all the high-risk, high-reward approach that we hold dear.”

He has reason for optimism. Red Bull sits third in this year’s Formula 1 team standings, just behind Mercedes, and has a realistic chance of overtaking them for second place in the final three races of this year’s season. It’s a far cry from the dominance Red Bull has enjoyed in recent years, but given how the season started, it would represent a significant rebound.

Backstage before our conversation, as makeup artists sprayed us with the stage lights, I asked Mikey’s about the pressure of those final races. His answer is usually methodical.

“We always say we take it one race at a time,” Lee said. “And that’s what we’re going to do for the next three races.” “You want to come to the race track, put the car in the right window,” meaning the narrow range of conditions in which the car performs optimally, “and fight for the win.”

“It is very difficult to fight at this level, but everyone at Milton Keynes has been doing a tremendous job transforming the car and giving us a competitive package until the end of the season,” he continues.

In the meantime, he insists that he does not look at the score tables or the questions. “We don’t look at numbers. We know there’s a lot going on in (the Formula 1 team standings), but we just look at it race by race.”

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