There's a moment backstage at Web Summit when a member of the production staff (well twice Laurent Mequise's size) puts a thick arm around the shoulders of the CEO of Oracle Red Bull Racing and guides him toward the soundboard to pull out his cell phone for a selfie. Most executives leading organizations of 2,000 people, even die-hard fans, would resent the informality. Mekies smiled instead, his demeanor unchanged as he responded to his star-struck crew.
It's a small moment, but perhaps a revealing one for Mekies, who just four months ago became the second person in Red Bull Racing's 20-year history to lead the sport.
“My first feeling was that I was suddenly honored and privileged to be part of such a great team,” Mekies later said on stage in English with a French accent. “This team has won more races than any other team in Formula 1 over the last 20 years, and suddenly you're one of them.”
It's no exaggeration to say “suddenly”. As widely reported, a completely unexpected phone call came in July. Christian Horner, the outspoken executive who has led Red Bull since entering F1 in 2005, has stepped down. Mekies, who ran the team's sister organization, the Racing Bulls, for just over a year, was tapped to step up.
In some ways, Mekies was an unlikely choice. While Horner revels in the media spotlight and gamesmanship that characterizes F1 team bosses, Mekies spent much of his career working in engineering. His approach to winning also reflects his technical background. He believes that removing friction from workflow and processes improves performance, as well as aerodynamics and tire compounds.
That philosophy also applies to team partnerships. Take 1Password, the cybersecurity company whose CEO David Faugno is sitting next to Mekies and me on stage at Web Summit. Mr. Forgno took over his iconic brand four months ago, the same week as Mr. Mekies.
A partnership between a cybersecurity company and an F1 team may seem strange. After all, security usually means friction. Passwords to check, systems to authenticate, workflows to slow people down. In F1, where every thousandth of a second matters, that is unacceptable.
But that's why Mekies believes 1Password is essential to Red Bull's competitiveness. “Our employees have to manage, log in and log out of complex systems: trucks, factories, simulators, aerodynamics in wind tunnels, vehicle dynamics, etc. … We are now able to work faster with this seamless login and logout of employees from one system to another than we could have done without the security level.”
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It's a small competitive advantage, but in F1 small advantages compound. “You're chasing the tiniest competitive advantage after the other,” Mekies points out. “Our tech geniuses, our employees, challenge us every day with the noise that is to some extent inevitable for large teams. With 1Password, we have this kind of answer to reduce the noise and give us more time to do our core work. Basically, that's where the performance comes from.”
From engineer to CEO
Mekies, 48, has seen F1 from almost every angle. After studying at ESTACA engineering school in Paris and Loughborough University in England, he entered F3 in 2000 and entered F1 in 2001 with British racing team Arrows. In 2003, he joined Italian team Minardi as a race engineer. When Red Bull bought the struggling team in 2006 and reborn it as Toro Rosso, the idea was to create a junior team to develop young drivers like Max Verstappen into Red Bull Racing, but Mekies was promoted to chief engineer.
Mekies stayed on for eight years before becoming safety director at the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the rule-maker for F1 and other motorsport series around the world. So he reportedly defended the “halo” system, a titanium safety device installed above the cockpit of F1 cars to protect the driver's head. He then moved to Ferrari as deputy race director, before returning to Red Bull's junior racing team (renamed Racing Bulls in 2024) five years later.
In short, Mekies brings a wide range of experience to the role. What he doesn't bring, at least not yet, is a ton of ego. When Verstappen won the 2025 Italian Grand Prix at Monza in September, the fastest race in F1 history, reporters asked Mekies about his contribution to the victory. His answer was modest. “I haven't contributed anything.” When reporters laughed, he added, “I'm not kidding.”
When asked about that moment on stage at Web Summit, Mekies shrugged. “All we do as leaders is put our people in a position to showcase their talents, so this is truly a win for them.”
In fact, Mekies views his role differently than his high-profile predecessor. He's not intentionally trying to “lead from behind.” Instead, he said on stage, “I don't think it's about approach. I don't think it's a leadership style. You'll find all kinds of styles of leadership. I think what's important in leadership is caring about people and caring about the culture of the company.”
Sure, it's certainly possible that Mekies will draw attention to his star driver (after all, Mekies wants to keep him), but he's more focused on the team as a whole. “The first thing I think about is the 2,000 employees who have never given up on this season and are back at the factory,” he says. “It takes a tremendous amount of corporate culture energy to maintain that motivation and fighting spirit.”
By the way, humility does not mean playing it safe. The Monza win also confirmed the somewhat surprising decision to continue pushing ahead with development of the 2025 car, rather than abandoning it for next year's development. “I wasn't happy with the performance of the car from the beginning of the year to the middle of the year,” Mekies told me. “We decided to push a little further into 2025. We felt like we couldn't just turn the page and do some wishful thinking about how everything will improve next year.”
That was a dangerous call. 2026 will bring completely new regulations (new chassis rules, new power unit rules), so most teams have already shifted resources to next year's cars. However, Mekies felt the team needed to understand what went wrong before moving forward. “We felt we needed to fundamentally address what was going wrong,” he says. “We probably pushed it a little bit more than some of our competitors, and luckily that's what led to this turnaround for us.”
The team is now wintering with less development time than its competitors, “but we have more confidence in our tools, methodologies and processes,” Mekies says.
move forward
If Mekies' 2025 rebuild was in jeopardy, 2026 means something else. Red Bull is building its own power unit for the first time in partnership with Ford, which Mekies says is a “crazy adventure”. (Starting in 2019, it has relied on Honda-based engines.) “For Oracle Red Bull Racing, I can't describe next year other than as a crazy challenge. That's how big it is for us.”
To get an idea of what the team is working on, Mekies explained on stage: “We're going to develop our own power unit with support from Ford and compete with the people who have been building F1 engines for over 90 years. It's a kind of crazy level that only Red Bull can do. We decided to build a night-time facility in the middle of a field in Milton Keynes.” [a large town about 50 miles northwest of London] From scratch in the UK — build a building and install a generator [which are massive, sophisticated test rigs]We're going to hire 600 people, get them to work with us, and eventually we're going to get an engine and try to get it up to speeds that will allow us to reach the trucks. ”
Can he promise to give Verstappen a championship-winning car next year? If you ask Mekies, he will answer right away. “It would be foolish to just go in there and think you'll be at the right level right away. That's not going to happen,” he says. “But we embrace this the Red Bull way, embracing all the high-risk, high-gain approaches that we value.”
He has reason to be optimistic. Red Bull, who sit third behind Mercedes in this year's F1 team standings, could well overtake Mercedes and move into second place in the final three races of the season. It's a far cry from the dominance Red Bull have enjoyed in recent years, but given the way the season started, it would represent a significant rebound.
Before our conversation, backstage as makeup artists were applying powder for the stage lights, I asked Mekies about the pressure of the race. His answers are typically methodical.
“We always say we'll take it race by race, so that's what we'll do for the next three races,” he told me. “You want to show up to the race track, put your car within the right window, meaning a narrow range of conditions where the car can perform optimally, and fight for the win.”
“It's incredibly difficult to compete at that level,” he continued, “but everyone at Milton Keynes has done a great job to turn the car around and give us a competitive package for the end of the season.”
During that time, he insists he doesn't look at points charts or what-ifs. “We don't look at the numbers. We know there's a lot going on in the world.” [F1 team standings]But we only look at it by race. ”
That's “the only thing we do,” he says, explaining Red Bull's mission. “Chasing lap time”