Laurent Mekies has been handed the keys to one of Formula One’s grandest kingdoms.
The Frenchman has been named as Christian Horner’s replacement as Red Bull CEO, filling the boots of one of the most successful men in the sport.
Red Bull dismissed Horner on Wednesday morning in news which hit the F1 world like an asteroid.
The need to move on with brutal efficiency was underlined when, within an hour of that bombshell revelation, Mekies was publicly promoted from his team principal role at feeder team Racing Bulls. The clock ticks. The next GP, in Belgium, looms in just over two weeks.
With his distinctive grey locks, moustache, goatee, and soul patch, Mekies brings an air of Albert Einstein about him – and you need some of his intellect to survive almost a quarter of a century in this cut-throat sport.
There’s also a genuine and sanguine nature to Mekies – his media duties, conducted in good English, are often accompanied with a smile and contagious energy.
Laurent Mekies has been named as Christian Horner’s successor at the helm of Red Bull
The Frenchman moves from their feeder team RB to become Red Bull CEO at a pivotal moment
Horner was sacked by Red Bull on Wednesday after 20 successful years at the helm
Grinning as he reflected on his Racing Bulls exit, he said: ‘The last year and a half has been an absolute privilege to lead the team with Peter (Bayer, CEO).
‘The spirit inside Racing Bulls is incredible, and I’m convinced this is just the beginning. Alan is the perfect man to take over now—he knows every bolt on that car and has been one of the pillars of our early successes.’
Onwards and upwards, then, for Mekies, who now has one of the golden jobs in motorsport.
Mekies, 48, has spent 24 years in F1 working in a variety of roles with Arrows, Minardi, Ferrari, and Red Bull’s consistently redbranded nursery team.
A winding path, but this wasn’t always the destination he intended. In an interview last year with RacingNews365 he admitted that becoming a team principal had never been his ‘dream’ – to him, being a race engineer and having close contact with the drivers was the ‘best job in the world’.
Mekies has a strrong educational background, having studied in Paris and Loughborough, and took his first professional role in motorsport in 2000 with Asiatech in Formula Three.
His first gig in F1 came with Arrows in 2001, where he worked in the background while Jos Verstappen and Enrique Bernoldi were out on track.
Yes, that’s right – his first contact with Formula One came in the same team as Max Verstappen’s father.
His first gig in F1 in 2001 saw him working alongside Max Verstappen’s father Jos (above)
Mekies seen working as Toro Rosso’s chief engineer alongside Jaime Alguersuari in 2009
His role as Racing Bulls’ team principal saw an increase in profile – here he is at the World Premiere for the F1 movie
That 2001 campaign was gruelling and will have prepared Mekies for any hardship in the sport. Arrows finished 10th out of 11 teams on the grid and scored a solitary point in Austria, which happened to be the last in Verstappen’s career.
From there he moved to Minardi, many fans’ favourite underdog, and cut his teeth as a race engineer with Mark Webber, Justin Wilson, Zsolt Baumgartner, and Christijan Albers.
Again, there was not much glamour at Minardi. The Italian minnows only scored 11 points in their last decade in the sport until Red Bull bought them out in 2005 and rechristened them as Scuderia Toro Rosso.
At the time of that switch, Mekies was promoted to be the team’s chief engineer, and in a spell spanning almost a decade he would rise to be head of vehicle performance.
The aim of the game at Toro Rosso was clear – rear talent for Horner’s Red Bull outfit, which also entered the scene in 2005 and became a leading outfit inside half a decade.
In that era, Mekies worked alongside a wide variety of drivers, many of whom were tipped for big futures but fell onto the F1 scrapheap as the Red Bull conveyor belt churned them out.
Daniel Ricciardo is the main name from that era and the one whose legacy has survived.
The others, namely Vitantonio Liuzzi, Scott Speed, Sebastien Bourdais, Jaime Alguersuari, Sebastien Buemi, and Jean-Eric Vergne, will be less familiar to the new generation of F1 fans but recognisable to longer-term viewers.
Mekies signs autographs for fans ahead of the Silverstone Grand Prix at the weekend
The Frenchman served in big roles with the FIA such as deputy race director, as seen here
Mekies had five years at Ferrari in the role of sporting director and racing director
In 2014, just a year before Verstappen burst onto the scene at the junior team, Mekies left and began a four-year spell with the sport’s governing body, the FIA.
There, he was the safety director and deputy race director, before – you guessed it, there’s another director title on his CV – he took up the post of Ferrari’s sporting director in 2018, later becoming racing director before he left in 2023.
Being a sporting director is one of the most hectic and high-pressured jobs in F1 outside of being a team principal.
It involves managing a team’s logistics and travel, keeping in touch with the FIA over sporting matters, understanding and interpreting the regulations, and a whole host of other responsibilities. In other words, a decent training ground for the top job one day.
That’s exactly the chance he got in 2024 when RB came calling, so back to his old stomping ground he returned.
It wasn’t an easy season for RB – they finished eighth out of 10 – but he proved his brutality when he canned Ricciardo with six races to go, giving Liam Lawson a chance in the hotseat.
Mekies later admitted that they should have handled Ricciardo’s sudden exit better. He was given no official send-off because his exit was only announced several days after the Singapore GP, and by rhe time the United States GP rolled around, Lawson was in place.
‘We are not happy with ultimately how we handled it, and of course we are very conscious that we could, and we should, have done a better job at that,’ said Mekies.
Pictured celebrating with Charles Leclerc after his victory at the Grand Prix of Austria in 2018
Max Verstappen has been the sole positive for Red Bull in a tumultuous season and recently committed his long-term future to them in an interview with Mail Sport
This season has been better, with RB placed seventh and in with a fighting chance of a top-half finish – about as good as they have ever been able to expect. In all their iterations, Red Bull’s feeder outfit have finished as high as sixth, back in 2019 and 2021.
RB seldom grab headlines and, as such, Mekies has been little more than a peripheral name to most fans until now: an occasional voice on Sky Sports’ broadcasts.
Yet he has been thrust suddenly into the big time at a moment of jeopardy for one of the sport’s trailblazers.
Red Bull sit fourth in the Constructors’ standings and only because of Max Verstappen’s brilliance.
Yuki Tsunoda described his car as ‘outstandingly slow’ en route to coming 15th (last of all the finishers) at Silverstone.
It is a boost to Mekies that Max verstappen recently confirmed his long-term future at Red Bull in an exclusive interview with Mail Sport. Whether he did that with any knowledge of Horner’s situation is unclear.
Mekies is tasked with rescuing Red Bull’s most turbulent season in a decade and leading them into a 2026 campaign which will see sweeping rule changes and a power unit partnership with Ford.
