Why a new era for Red Bull required a bigger changing of the guard

Twelve months ago, Red Bull was a team in crisis: Max Verstappen had dug in and claimed a fourth drivers’ title very much against the run of form on-track, while factional warfare raged in the corridors of power.

When the 2025 season began and the new car demonstrably retained vices that were supposed to have been purged, the internal conflict intensified. And now, as in the denouement of a Shakespearean tragedy, the bodies of the protagonists now litter the stage.

At its root this is a tale of power and wrangles over influence. When Red Bull magnate Dietrich Mateschitz bought in to Formula 1 in a big way in the mid-2000s, acquiring the moribund Jaguar Racing and Minardi enterprises and rebooting them as a senior team and a junior development squad, he naturally leaned on the wisdom and experience of fellow Austrian Dr Helmut Marko.

A Le Mans 24 Hours winner (in a Porsche 917 no less) and entrant in a handful of F1 grands prix until an eye injury curtailed his career, Marko had enjoyed Red Bull’s patronage in running his own team in the junior formulas, and had set up the Red Bull Junior Team in 2001 to create a programme through which young talent could be identified and guided towards F1.

To actually run the team Mateschitz hired Christian Horner, an ambitious young team owner-manager and former racer who had achieved greater things on the pitwall than in the cockpit. Horner turned the team around and achieved the notable coup of poaching Adrian Newey from McLaren to oversee engineering, but increasingly began to see Marko as an unwelcome presence.

In Marko’s telling, it was he and Mateschitz who had hired Horner, a narrative of which he was always happy to remind the team principal. Even as Red Bull scored four consecutive drivers’ titles with Sebastian Vettel between 2010 and 2013 the friction grew: on the one side the man who, though still but an employee, saw himself as the architect of the team’s success; on the other, the shadowy minister-without-portfolio who acted as the owner’s representative on the factory floor.

Although Mateschitz had set his affairs well in order with a clear succession plan before his death in 2022, when any leader of this magnitude departs the mortal firmament a tawdry scrabble to take advantage of the regime change is sure to follow. In this case the Austrians stuck together, while Horner sought to shore up his position by deepening his connections with the Thai end of the business: Red Bull co-owner Chalerm Yoovidhya.

The schism between Horner and Marko was complicated by Marko’s close relationship with Max Verstappen and his father, Jos. That made Helmut a very difficult man to fire, even when Horner sought for this to happen over his belief that Marko was responsible for leaking a tranche of rather sordid WhatsApp messages connected to Horner’s alleged harassment of a female employee.

New engineering-led approach paid dividends, albeit with Verstappen just falling short in thrilling title-decider

Photo by: Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The Verstappens stood by their man, making it very clear that if Marko were removed, they would promptly take their services elsewhere.

Marko and Horner continued to be at daggers drawn until the summer of 2025, by which point the threat of Verstappen triggering a performance clause to exit his contract early moved Red Bull’s leaders to appease their prize asset by enacting immediate management change, replacing Horner with Laurent Mekies.

A new engineering-led approach, combined with car developments that were already in the works at the time of the change – a new floor added at Monza in September – proved a transformative catalyst for Verstappen to regain lost ground in the championship, to thrilling effect. But the machinery was still not quite ticking over to the satisfaction of Red Bull’s new leaders – the likes of Oliver Mintzlaff, a corporate man through and through, drilled in the ways of transparency and accountability rather than handshake deals between chums.

For senior management, Marko’s tendency to crop up like Banquo’s ghost and cause trouble seemed to have become a source of embarrassment.

This case isn’t the only example of Marko’s filter-free dialogue with the media leaving his paymasters wishing he would follow the example of the three wise monkeys

There have also been well-sourced claims that Marko, perhaps emboldened by no longer having Horner around as a foil, was taking decisions relating to young drivers without proper sign-off from above.

While it’s understood that, contrary to reports, bringing Arvid Lindblad from F2 to F1 with Racing Bulls was approved by management, there are questions surrounding Alex Dunne’s unexpected departure from McLaren’s driver-development programme before the end of the season.

After Dunne’s surprise exit from McLaren, Marko publicly described him as “very like a Red Bull driver”. Several sources close to Red Bull claim that Marko signed Dunne up against the wishes of other stakeholders, including Mekies, and that the young Irishman then had to be bought out of his contract.

The case above isn’t the only example of Marko’s filter-free dialogue with the media leaving his paymasters wishing he would follow the example of the three wise monkeys. After the Qatar GP, Marko’s unproven assertion that Mercedes rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli had deliberately allowed Lando Norris to pass late in the race was a significant influence on Antonelli receiving death threats on social media.

Mekies needed to prove himself before Marko was given the heave-ho

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

Granted, the picture presented by the international TV feed was unclear – the camera lingered on Norris rather than Antonelli as it panned across, then the footage cut to a front-on shot of Norris mid-pass – but it was irresponsible and thoughtless to feed grievances based on assumption.

Compare and contrast with the example further down the grid of Sauber/Audi team principal Jonathan Wheatley, who holds his post-race press conferences after a full debrief with his drivers and engineers, so he can be thoroughly across every detail.

The Qatar farrago left Red Bull having to make a humiliating public apology – not that this contained the conspiracy theorists, of course. Better to have not made the utterance in the first place.

There was an obvious solution for that and Red Bull has taken it, although Marko’s departure – a year before the end of his contract – was presented as his decision to “step down”.

“Helmut approached me with the wish to end his role as motorsport advisor at the end of the year,” Mintzlaff was quoted as saying in the press release announcing Marko’s departure. “I deeply regret his decision, as he has been an influential figure for more than two decades, and his departure marks the end of an extraordinary era.

“After a long and intensive conversation, I knew I had to respect his wishes, as I gained the impression that the timing felt right for him to take this step.”

Despite the emollient tones of the release, Marko immediately undermined it by giving an excoriating interview with the Dutch publication De Limburger. In this he said: “I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I didn’t read that press release full of nonsense.”

Marko devoted much of the rest of the interview to picking a scab his former bosses might have wanted to leave longer to heal. Horner again was the target. “I remember a party in 2022 before the Austrian Grand Prix,” he said.

Early success under Horner – here celebrating the team’s 1-3 result in the 2011 Singapore GP

Photo by: Daniel Kalisz / Sutton Images via Getty Images

“Didi [Mateschitz] was there, but he wasn’t in good health. Christian came to me and said, ‘He won’t make it to the end of the year.’ From that moment on, he started cosying up to Chalerm Yoovidhya. When Didi passed away later that year, he did everything he could to take over with Yoovidhya’s support. On behalf of Austria, I did everything I could to prevent that happening.”

Now off the leash, Marko will no doubt continue to bring a spotlight to bear on an era Red Bull would have wanted to usher into history. But his memory appears to be faulty, especially when it pertains to the machinations of the opposing faction.

“Do you remember me saying, during Sergio Perez’s time, that Mexicans are less focused than the Dutch or Germans?” he said. “That was fabricated, perhaps by them.”

Mekies has shown that he knows when to show his hand and when to simply smile and say as little as possible

This is a highly peculiar assertion, given that the remarks (“We know that [Perez] has problems in qualifying, he has fluctuations in form, he is South American and he is just not as completely focused in his head as Max [Verstappen] is or as Sebastian [Vettel]”) were made by Marko to ServusTV, Red Bull’s in-house channel, after the 2023 Italian GP and are therefore in the public domain. To have fabricated this as claimed would have required “them” to engage in an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism.

You might ask what ‘Team Max’ makes of Marko’s departure, given that Verstappen Jr described the doctor as one of his “pillars”. That is understood to be one of the reasons Horner and Marko were not ushered out of the door simultaneously in the summer: Mekies needed time to prove himself.

Not only that, but Mekies has shown – lessons no doubt drawn from experience in the harshly political environments of previous jobs with the FIA and Ferrari – that he knows when to show his hand and when to simply smile and say as little as possible. Public tantrums are now a thing of the past at Red Bull: welcome to the era of soft power.

Now that Marko has departed, Red Bull enters a new era

Photo by: Jared C Tilton / Getty Images

What next for Christian Horner?

Ever since Christian Horner was removed from his role as Red Bull team principal last summer, there has been great speculation – some of it fuelled by the man himself, via select media briefings – about what he might do next.

Among the most persistent rumours were those connecting him with Aston Martin; it’s understood, though, that while he approached owner Lawrence Stroll, he was never under serious consideration for a role there.

Among the complexities of finding a new position is Horner’s requirement for equity in the business, such as his long-time rival Toto Wolff enjoys at Mercedes. Wolff’s status as part-owner of one of the past decade’s most dominant teams is known to be among the factors that appeared to enable him to reside rent-free in Horner’s head these past few years, as evinced by their many public spats.

None of the teams are entirely up for sale – even Alpine, whose parent company Renault recently reaffirmed its commitment to supporting the Enstone-based squad back to the front of the grid. But the 24% of Alpine owned by a consortium involving Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners and Maximum Effort Investments, backed by star names including the actor Ryan Reynolds and golfer Rory McIlroy, is potentially available.

That deal was said to be worth $200million when it was done in 2023, valuing the team at between $800m and $900m. As an indicator of how the wider market now sees the earning potential of F1, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s buy-in to Mercedes placed that team’s value at $6billion.

It is known that Otro has already held exploratory talks with at least one interested party to see how its investment might have appreciated. Though it would be a mistake to conclude that this inevitably means a sale is imminent, it suggests the thought is there.

It’s also understood that, after an initial period of desperately seeking a way back into F1, Horner is now taking a more measured approach. There will inevitably be winners and losers when the season begins; some teams will nail the new regulations, others won’t. As Horner himself was reminded last summer, in the corporate world, some form of human sacrifice is required when a project is deemed to be failing. By the end of the first round of three flyaways, it’s likely that at least one team will be in the market for a new leader.

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