​A year has passed since Red Bull decided to part ways with CEO and team principal Christian Horner after the 2025 British Grand Prix, but what has actually changed at the Milton Keynes outfit since then? From Max Verstappen’s extraordinary comeback in the 2025 Drivers’ Championship race to Isack Hadjar emerging as the brightest glimmer of hope to lift the second-seat curse that has long haunted the Dutch driver, this is the story of Laurent Mekies’s first year at Red Bull’s helm.
Having stepped up from the sister outfit Racing Bulls, Mekies was immediately tasked with restoring Red Bull’s form at a time when Verstappen was stalling in the standings with the RB21 and both Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda were struggling in the second seat. Verstappen soon credited Mekies with a “common-sense” approach and an engineering mindset, saying that the questions Mekies asked the engineers were the right ones and that this approach meshed well with the team. The Dutchman’s impressive resurgence began in earnest as a direct result of that leadership shift.
Verstappen had already begun to feel the improvement by the time the team arrived at Zandvoort, where a 104-point gap in the championship had once loomed. The Dutch driver explained that there had been a notable step forward at the Dutch GP, and by Monza another improvement had materialized, a pattern that would continue as the season unfolded. By the time the curtain fell on the Abu Dhabi finale, the deficit had been reduced to a mere two points after Verstappen clinched five more victories beyond Monza, pushing the title race all the way to the final rounds against McLaren’s Lando Norris.
Looking back on the 2025 season, Verstappen spoke of pride in his Red Bull “second family,” choosing to highlight the dramatic turnaround rather than dwell on those two points of difference. Yet, despite Mekies’s credited role in orchestrating that renaissance, Christian Horner has recently suggested that Red Bull’s revival might have happened regardless of his dismissal, underscoring how much the organizational dynamics had shifted and how much the team’s performance in 2025 owed to a combination of leadership and engineering adjustments.
The consequences of that season, however, became starkly apparent in early 2026. Red Bull found themselves unable to develop a car capable of challenging for the title once more. Horner’s departure had removed a driving force behind a number of pivotal initiatives, including the debut of Red Bull’s first in-house powertrain, developed in collaboration with Ford. As the team faced an uphill struggle against Mercedes, Ferrari, and McLaren, it was clear that the new leadership had inherited a car that needed not just tweaks but a fundamental rethinking of balance, weight distribution, and the integration of a brand-new power unit under regulations as complex as those of 2026.
Part of the ongoing narrative has been the search for a credible successor to the “second seat curse.” In that context, Isack Hadjar has emerged as a beacon of potential, representing the best chance in years for Red Bull to unlock a sustained, all-around performance boost that could complement Verstappen’s talent rather than overshadow it. The FR storyline suggests a renewed emphasis on nurturing young talent within the Red Bull ecosystem, while also confronting the practical engineering and development challenges that come with adopting a cutting-edge powertrain and balancing car dynamics.
In sum, Mekies’s first year introduced a shift toward more pragmatic engineering-led leadership at Red Bull, with Verstappen benefiting from a return to a steadier, question-based collaboration that emphasized clear problem-solving. The 2025 surge demonstrated what a well-tuned alliance between driver and team could achieve, even as the 2026 cycle underscored the breadth of the task that lay ahead: reviving a car’s competitiveness in a changing regulatory and competitive landscape, integrating a new powertrain, and finding the right mix of experience and youth to sustain a championship bid beyond the era of the Horner regime.