Laurent Mekies: The Unassuming Engineer Leading Red Bull Racing's F1 Future

There’s a telling moment backstage at Web Summit. Laurent Mekies, the Oracle Red Bull Racing CEO, finds himself steered by a burly production crew member, easily twice his size, towards the soundboard for a selfie. Most executives leading 2,000-person organizations might bristle at such informality, even from a superfan. Yet Mekies smiles, his composure unwavering as he graciously accommodates the starstruck individual.

This small interaction perhaps reveals much about Mekies who, just four months prior, became only the second person to lead Red Bull Racing in its 20-year history as an F1 team.

“The first feeling is one of being privileged, being honored, to suddenly be part of such an incredible team,” Mekies later recounts 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” is no exaggeration. As widely reported, the wholly unexpected call came in July. Christian Horner, the outspoken executive who had led Red Bull since its F1 entry in 2005, was out. Mekies, who had been managing the team’s sister outfit, Racing Bulls, for just over a year, was tapped to step up.

In some ways, Mekies was an improbable choice. While Horner thrived in the media spotlight and the gamesmanship characteristic of F1 team principals, Mekies spent much of his career in engineering. His approach to winning reflects this technical background; he sees performance gains not only in aerodynamics and tire compounds but also in eliminating friction from workflows and processes.

This philosophy extends to the team’s partnerships. Consider 1Password, the cybersecurity company whose CEO, David Faugno, shares the Web Summit stage with Mekies. Faugno himself took the helm of his iconic brand four months ago — the very same week as Mekies.

The collaboration between a cybersecurity company and an F1 team might seem unusual. Security often implies friction: passwords to check, systems to authenticate, and workflows that inherently slow people down. In F1, where thousandths of a second are critical, such delays are unacceptable.

However, this is precisely why Mekies views 1Password as integral to Red Bull’s competitive edge. “Our people have to manage, 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 move faster today with this seamless login and logout for our people from one system to another, without compromising our security level.”

It’s a seemingly minor competitive advantage, and other teams certainly have their exclusive relationships they’d similarly describe as crucial edges, including Mercedes with CrowdStrike and McLaren with Darktrace. But in F1, small advantages 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 an answer that reduces this noise, increasing time for the core business, and that’s fundamentally where the performance comes from.”

From Engineer to CEO

At 48, Mekies has experienced Formula 1 from nearly every angle. After studying at ESTACA, an engineering school in Paris, and Loughborough University in the U.K., he began in Formula 3 in 2000 before moving into F1 with the British racing team Arrows in 2001. He then joined Minardi, an Italian team, in 2003 as a race engineer. When Red Bull acquired the struggling outfit and transformed it into Toro Rosso in 2006 — with the aim of creating a junior team to develop young drivers like Max Verstappen for Red Bull Racing — Mekies was promoted to chief engineer.

Mekies remained for eight years before becoming safety director at the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the global rulemaker for Formula 1 and other motorsport series. There, he reportedly championed the titanium "halo" system, a safety device mounted above the cockpit of Formula 1 cars to protect the driver’s head. His career then led him to Ferrari as deputy race director, and five years later, back to Red Bull’s junior racing team (rebranded Racing Bulls in 2024).

In short, Mekies brings a vast breadth of experience to the role. What he doesn’t bring — at least not yet — is a significant ego. When Verstappen won the 2025 Italian Grand Prix at Monza in September, in what became the fastest race in F1 history, reporters asked Mekies about his contribution. His answer was self-effacing: “I have zero contribution.” When the reporters laughed, he added, “I’m not kidding.”

When asked about that moment onstage 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, in fact, sees his role differently than his high-profile predecessor. He isn’t deliberately trying to “lead from behind.” Instead, he states 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 could certainly lavish attention on his star driver (whom he aims to retain), he is more focused 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, however, doesn’t equate to playing it safe. The Monza win also validated a somewhat surprising decision: to continue pushing development on the 2025 car rather than abandoning it for next year’s focus. “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 explains. “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 risky call. With entirely new regulations arriving in 2026 — encompassing new chassis rules and power unit regulations — most teams had already redirected resources to next year’s car. But Mekies felt his team needed to understand what had gone wrong before they could advance. “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 enters winter with less development time than its rivals, “but with a lot more trust in our tools, in our methodologies, in our process,” Mekies asserts.

Driving Forward

If Mekies’ 2025 turnaround was risky, 2026 represents something entirely different: a “crazy adventure,” as Mekies describes Red Bull building its own power unit for the first time, in partnership with Ford. (The team 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.”

To grasp the scale of the team's undertaking, Mekies articulates it onstage: “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 car next year? When Mekies is asked, he responds, “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 reason for optimism. Sitting third in this year’s F1 team standings, just behind Mercedes, Red Bull has a realistic shot at 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 enjoyed in recent years, but given how the season started, it would represent a major recovery.

Before our public conversation, as makeup artists powdered us for the stage lights, I asked Mekies about the pressure of those final races.

“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,” meaning the narrow range of conditions where a car 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 looking at the points 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.”