Red Bull has had to say goodbye to several key figures within the team in recent years. Some left for competitors, such as McLaren or Aston Martin, others retired or left the team after internal changes. Prominent names like Christian Horner and Adrian Newey also departed. An overview of the exodus at the top of Red Bull.
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Gianpiero Lambiase
Max Verstappen’s regular race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, is leaving Red Bull Racing. The Briton, who is also Head of Racing within the team, still has an ongoing contract until 2027 with the Austrian racing stable. After that, he will start working for competitor McLaren. Lambiase had already been linked to several top teams in recent times, including Aston Martin and Williams.
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Lambiase has been working with Verstappen since 2016 and he would never want to work with another driver. That collaboration will remain intact until 2027. At McLaren, Lambiase will take on a supporting role within the race organization. His new role will support team principal Andrea Stella, giving Stella more room to focus on the leadership aspects of his role.
Helmut Marko
Helmut Marko stepped down as Red Bull’s top advisor at the end of 2025. The 82-year-old Austrian, who had been active in motorsport for sixty years – twenty of which were at Red Bull – stepped down after a meeting with sporting CEO Oliver Mintzlaff. He is now retiring. Narrowly missing out on the world title last season played a role in this. It became clear to him that it was time to close this “long, intense and successful chapter”.
Marko was primarily involved in scouting talent for both Formula 1 teams – Red Bull and Racing Bulls. He brought great champions to the sport, such as Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen. The top advisor looks back on a fantastic time.
Christian Horner
Twenty years after he took office as Red Bull team principal, the team announced that Christian Horner would leave immediately. In recent months, the Briton had come under increasing pressure. Sporting performances have been disappointing this season, and Max Verstappen is seeing his fifth consecutive world title slip through his fingers. At the same time, things have been rumbling behind the scenes for some time, with tensions within management and ongoing criticism of the team’s direction. Not to mention the scandal that gripped the paddock last year – a female employee accused Horner of inappropriate behavior, although he was later cleared.
After the recent British GP – where the team earned only ten World Championship points thanks to Verstappen’s fifth place – a meeting took place between shareholders Mark Mateschitz, Chalerm Yoovidhya and sporting director Oliver Mintzlaff. They decided to take firm action and suspended Horner with immediate effect.
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Adrian Newey
Just as Max Verstappen had made a dominant start to the 2024 season, technical director Adrian Newey announced before the Miami GP that he would be leaving the team. In his long Formula 1 career, the celebrated designer has won numerous championships, in recent years primarily with Red Bull. He joined the team in 2006, where he delivered championship-worthy designs in no time. In the hands of Sebastian Vettel, his cars brought the team four constructors’ titles and four drivers’ world titles.
With the arrival of Max Verstappen and the Honda engines, new successes followed in recent years. With the RB19, Newey effectively designed the most competitive Formula 1 car ever; Red Bull won no fewer than 21 of the 22 Grands Prix in 2023. But despite all that success, Newey seemed disillusioned by the busyness of the sport. In his own words, he wished to ‘take a step back’. After a few months of retirement, the itch returned, and he once again longed for the challenge and competitiveness of Formula 1. Three months after his departure from Red Bull, he announced his return with Aston Martin.
Jonathan Wheatley
In August 2024, three months after Adrian Newey announced his departure from Red Bull, sporting director Jonathan Wheatley followed suit. At the end of last year, he said goodbye to the team to make his debut as Sauber team principal this year. He too had joined Red Bull early on as team manager and later grew into one of the key figures behind the racing stable’s success.
But the challenge at the new Audi factory team beckoned. The German car manufacturer announced in August 2022 that it wanted to participate in Formula 1 by taking over the current Sauber team. Since Wheatley could not progress further at Red Bull, he chose a new employer. Incidentally, he left Audi again last month for private reasons.
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Will Courtenay
Shortly after the 2024 Singapore GP, Red Bull announced that head strategist Will Courtenay would leave the team to join McLaren, where he took on the role of sporting director as of the beginning of this year. Courtenay was a familiar face in Milton Keynes; he started in 2005 with the struggling Jaguar team and stayed on after the Red Bull takeover. In the years that followed, he worked his way up from strategy engineer to senior analyst, moving into the top of the strategy department in 2010.
Rob Marshall
Finally, Red Bull is also missing former top engineer Rob Marshall, who also made the switch to McLaren in 2024. Marshall worked for the Austrian racing stable for seventeen years and thus also played an important role in the earlier successes with Sebastian Vettel. McLaren’s current rise is partly attributed to his designs. For example, the discovery with which the papayas manage to cool their tires better – according to experts the major advantage of the MCL39 – is said to have been an invention of Marshall’s.
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