There is a moment behind the scenes Web Summit when a member of the production crew — easily twice Laurent Mekies’ size — wraps a heavy arm around the Oracle Red Bull Racing CEO’s shoulder and directs him toward the speaker to grab his phone for a selfie. Most executives leading organizations of 2,000 people would run into the informal situation, even from a superfan. Instead, Mekies smiles, his demeanor unchanged as he hosts the beaming crew member.
It’s a small moment, but perhaps a revelatory one for Mekies, who, just four months ago, became only the second person to lead Red Bull Racing in its 20-year history.
“The first feeling is that you’re privileged, honored, to suddenly be part of such an incredible team,” Mekies tells me later onstage in French-accented English. “This team has won more than anyone else in Formula 1 for the last two decades. And suddenly you’re part of it.”
“Suddenly” is not an exaggeration. As widely reported, the completely unexpected call came in July. Christian Horner, the clear-cut executive who has led Red Bull since entering F1 in 2005, was out. Mekies, who had been with the team’s sister outfit Racing Bulls for just over a year, was chosen to step up.
Mekies was an unlikely choice in some ways. Where Horner basks in the media spotlight and expertise that defines F1 team principals, Mekies has spent much of his career in the technical trenches. His approach to winning reflects that technical background as well. He sees performance gains not only in aerodynamics and tire compounds, but also in eliminating friction from workflows and processes.
This philosophy extends to team collaborations. Take 1Password, the cybersecurity company whose CEO, David Faugno, is sitting next to Mekies and me on the Web Summit stage. Faugno took over his own flagship brand four months ago – the same week as Mekies.
A collaboration between a cyber security company and an F1 team might seem strange. Security, after all, usually means friction. Passwords to control, systems to authenticate, workflows that slow people down. In F1, where milliseconds matter, this is unacceptable.
But that’s exactly why Mekies sees 1Password as an integral part of Red Bull’s competitive advantage. “Our people have to manage and connect and disconnect from complex systems — aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics on the track, back at the factory, in the simulator, in the wind tunnel… We’re going faster today at that seamless connection and disconnection of our people from one system to another than we did without the security layer.”
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It’s a small competitive advantage, but in F1, small advantages compound. “You take care of the smallest competitive advantage, one after another,” notes Mekies. “Our technology genius, our people — they challenge us every day about the noise that’s kind of inevitable for a large team. With 1Password, we have this kind of response where we reduce the noise, increase the time for core activity, and that’s where the performance comes from.”
From engineer to CEO
At 48, Mekies has seen 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 F1 with a British racing team called Arrows in 2001. He then joined Minardi, an Italian team, in 2003 as a racing engineer. When Red Bull bought the tough outfit and turned it into Toro Rosso in 2006 – the idea was to create a junior team to develop young drivers like Max Verstappen for Red Bull Racing – Mekies was promoted to chief engineer.
Mekies stayed for eight years before moving on to become safety director at the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the rule-setter for Formula 1 and other motorsport series worldwide. There, he reportedly defended the titanium safety device fitted above the cockpit of Formula 1 cars to protect the driver’s head – the “halo” system. He then went to Ferrari as deputy race director and five years later, back to Red Bull’s junior racing team (renamed Racing Bulls in 2024).
Mekies brings a breadth of experience to the role, in short. What it doesn’t bring — not yet, 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 F1 history, reporters asked Mekies about his contribution to the victory. His answer was self-explanatory: “I have zero contribution.” When reporters laughed, he added: “I’m not kidding.”
When I ask about that moment on stage at Web Summit, Mekies shrugs. “All we do as leaders is put our people in a position to be able to express their talents. So it’s a very big win for them.”
Mekies sees his role differently than his high-profile predecessor, in fact. He doesn’t deliberately try to “lead from behind”. Instead, he tells me on stage that he doesn’t “think the approach matters. I don’t think it’s the leadership style. You’ll find every possible style in leadership. I think what matters in leadership is caring for people and a culture of caring for the company.”
Indeed, while Mekies could certainly turn the spotlight on his protagonist (Mekies wants to keep him after all), he’s more focused on the collective. “Your first thoughts are about the 2,000 people back in the factories who never quit this season,” he says. “It takes a tremendous amount of energy, of corporate culture, to maintain that motivation and that fighting spirit.”
By the way, humility doesn’t mean playing it safe. The Monza win also validated a somewhat surprising decision: to keep pushing the 2025 car rather than abandoning it for next year’s development. “We weren’t happy with where the performance of the car was at the beginning of this year and into the middle of this year,” Mekies tells me. “We decided to push a little bit harder with 2025. We didn’t feel like we could just turn the page and have wishful thinking about how everything will be better next year.”
It was a dangerous call. With completely new regulations coming in 2026 – new chassis rules, new powerplant regulations – most teams had already shifted resources to next year’s car. But Mekies felt his team needed to figure out what had gone wrong before they could move forward. “We felt we had to get to the bottom of what hadn’t worked,” he says. “Maybe we pushed a little harder than some of the competition. And luckily, it gave us that twist in form.”
Now the team is entering the winter with less development time than their rivals, “but with a lot more confidence in our tools, in our methodologies, in our process,” says Mekies.
Driving forward
If Mekies’ recovery in 2025 was risky, 2026 represents something else: a “crazy adventure”, as Mekies describes Red Bull building its own power unit for the first time, in partnership with Ford. (Relying on Honda-based engines from 2019.) “For Oracle Red Bull Racing, there are no other words to describe next year other than a crazy challenge. That’s how big it is for us.”
For a sense of what the team is undertaking, here’s how Mekies describes it on stage: “We’re going to build our own power unit with the support of Ford and compete with people who have been building Formula 1 engines for over 90 years. It’s the crazy level that only Red Bull can do on a field in the middle of the night in Milton. [a large town about 50 miles northwest of London] in the UK from scratch — get the building, put 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 improve it to get to the track.”
Can Verstappen be promised a championship-winning car next year? When I ask Mekies, he answers immediately. “We’d be foolish to think that we just go there and we’re going to be at the right level straight away. That’s not going to happen,” he says. “But we’re taking it the Red Bull way. We’re taking it with all the high-risk, high-reward approach that we love.”
He has reasons for optimism. Third in this year’s F1 team standings, just behind Mercedes, Red Bull have a realistic chance of overtaking them for second place in the final three races of this season. It’s a far cry from the dominance Red Bull have enjoyed in recent years, but given how the season has started, it would represent a significant turnaround.
Backstage before our chat, as our makeup artists dust us off for the spotlight, I ask Mekies about the pressure of these finals. His response is typically methodical.
“We always say we take it race by race. That’s what we’re going to do in the next three races,” he tells me. “You want to show up on the track, put the car in the right window,” meaning the narrow range of conditions where a car performs optimally, “and fight for the win.”
It is “incredibly difficult to race at this level,” he continues, “but everyone at Milton Keynes has done a tremendous job to turn the car around and give us a competitive package for the end of the season.”
In the meantime, he insists he’s not looking at scoreboards or what-ifs. “We don’t look at the numbers. We know there’s a lot going on at [F1 team standings]but we see it only as race with race.”
That’s “the only thing we do,” he says, describing Red Bull’s mission. “Chasing lap times.”
