Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies has accepted that Gianpiero Lambiase is leaving the team for McLaren — and he has used the moment to redraw Red Bull's transfer playbook for the 2026 regulations era.
Speaking in Miami on May 7, Mekies framed Lambiase's departure as a promotion to be saluted rather than a betrayal to be processed. "Now GP had an extraordinary opportunity. You know, he's going to be a team principal there," Mekies said, hinting at a McLaren job description that goes well beyond the race-engineer role Lambiase made his own beside Max Verstappen since 2017.
The Frenchman acknowledged Red Bull cannot pretend the move is irrelevant, but he pointedly refused to escalate the situation into an open recruitment war.
"First of all, we talk very often with Zak and with my other colleagues. So it's not related to one thing or another, but certainly none of us wanted to go into a ping-pong about it. We had a good chat about it, like we always do, and we move on."
Mekies bracketed the Lambiase loss inside a wider Red Bull policy he has clearly been waiting to articulate publicly. With Williams's James Vowles having just hired Mercedes aerodynamics chief Claire Simpson, and similar moves expected between Brackley, Woking and Milton Keynes through the summer, the team principal made the team's intent explicit.
"I have said it many times, we don't want to be defensive about the fact that we lost some talent. It's a fact. If and when we need to go and get a specific set of skills or experience from some of our dear competitors around the pitlane, we will do it — as we have done before."
Across the pitlane, McLaren's reaction was a study in cool. CEO Zak Brown was asked directly whether the Lambiase signing was the prelude to a much bigger play — perhaps an unhappy Oscar Piastri agitating for a way out — and answered with a smile. "He knows something I don't, apparently. I've got one, and I've got a great one. I've got the best one in pitlane, Andrea Stella. So I couldn't be happier with Andrea."
Stella himself, the subject of separate rumours linking him with a leadership move, addressed the noise head-on. "Honestly, some of the recent rumours, including those regarding astronomical salaries and mythical pre-contracts, have made me smile."
The substance of the move is what gives the politics its bite. Verstappen and Lambiase have built one of the defining radio relationships of the hybrid era — clipped, sarcastic, championship-winning — and replacing that shorthand for 2027 will force Red Bull to rebuild not just a strategic engineer pairing but a piece of cultural infrastructure that has helped underpin four straight drivers' titles.
For McLaren, Lambiase joins a constructors' champion that is already stockpiling experience for the new 2026 cars and the 2030 power-unit cycle. For Red Bull, Mekies has chosen public calm — but his line about hiring "around the pitlane" reads like a warning shot, not a pacifier.
