Mekies Contract Extension Rewards Red Bull's Recovery, but the Real Test Is 2027

Red Bull’s shareholders have committed to Laurent Mekies for the long term, extending the contract of the team principal who replaced Christian Horner in the summer of 2025. The deal comes in the week after Max Verstappen converted pole into victory at the Singapore Grand Prix, Red Bull’s second win of the season. It is a vote of confidence that surprised parts of the paddock, and it deserves scrutiny rather than automatic applause.

From caretaker to chosen successor

When Mekies moved across from the junior team to take Horner’s chair in July 2025, the appointment had the look of a holding move. Red Bull was in open turmoil. The team that had dominated 2023 had lost Adrian Newey and Jonathan Wheatley, its second seat had become a revolving door, and Horner’s two decades in charge ended abruptly amid friction at board level. Mekies, a former FIA safety delegate and Ferrari deputy who had run the Faenza outfit since 2024, was a calm, technically literate operator. Few people outside Milton Keynes saw him as a long-term figurehead.

What followed changed that view. Verstappen’s form in the second half of 2025 turned a season that had seemed lost into a genuine title fight, and he finished only two points short of Lando Norris. However much of the credit belongs to Mekies, the team stopped leaking energy into internal politics and started extracting more from a car that had been difficult to set up all year. Engineers spoke more openly, the car’s development direction appeared to settle, and Verstappen’s public mood visibly lifted.

The 2026 season was always going to be the harder examination. New chassis and power unit regulations reset the competitive order, and Red Bull faced them with its first in-house power unit, built with Ford. Any team principal inheriting that project halfway through would be judged largely on whether it went badly wrong. It has not, and that is the foundation on which the shareholders have built this decision.

What Singapore proves, and what it doesn’t

The headline numbers are respectable rather than spectacular. After 17 rounds Red Bull is fourth in the constructors’ championship on 332 points, seven behind McLaren and 112 behind Ferrari. Verstappen sits fourth in the drivers’ standings on 221 points with two wins, 119 points adrift of Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

Singapore showed the best version of this team. Verstappen took pole and won ahead of Charles Leclerc, with Antonelli third, on a circuit that punishes any weakness in low-speed traction and energy deployment. Isack Hadjar, starting 22nd, carved through to 10th and a point. That is an encouraging sign from a second driver in his first season at the senior team.

Yet the wider picture is sobering. Mercedes has won 11 of the 17 Grands Prix and leads the constructors’ table by 134 points over Ferrari and 246 over Red Bull. Antonelli has eight wins and a 102-point lead over his team-mate George Russell with six rounds left. Red Bull has not been the benchmark at any stage of this regulation cycle, and on most weekends it has been fighting for podiums rather than wins.

Team	Points	Wins
Mercedes	578	11
Ferrari	444	2
McLaren	339	2
Red Bull	332	2

The table frames the debate neatly. Red Bull is level on wins with Ferrari and McLaren and within a single good weekend of third place. It is also a long way from the team that won 21 of 22 races in 2023.

The case for waiting until 2027

The case against extending Mekies now is straightforward. Contracts of this kind usually reward a team principal for delivering a competitive car, and Red Bull has not yet produced one capable of challenging for a championship under the 2026 rules. The decisive measure of the new power unit programme is whether it can match Mercedes over the next two or three seasons, not whether it reached the grid reliably in year one, which it has. Nobody, Mekies included, can yet answer that.

There is also a question of attribution. Verstappen remains the single biggest performance differentiator in the sport, and a significant share of Red Bull’s points this year reflects his ability to drag the car to places it arguably should not be. Hadjar has 97 points, fewer than half of Verstappen’s tally. That is a far healthier ratio than Red Bull’s recent second drivers managed, but it still suggests a car that rewards one exceptional driver more than it flatters a capable one.

Precedent counsels caution, too. Ferrari has repeatedly extended or anointed team principals on the strength of a promising spell, only to reverse course when the car failed to follow. Mattia Binotto’s tenure is the obvious recent example: promoted to team principal at the start of 2019 on the back of a competitive 2018, he was gone by the end of 2022 despite leading the championship early that year. Long contracts do not insulate anyone from a bad season. They simply make the eventual change more expensive.

Why stability was worth buying now

Even so, the timing makes sense once you consider what Red Bull is protecting.

The first priority is Verstappen. His future has been the subject of persistent speculation since 2024, and the clearest message a team can send its star driver is that the leadership around him is settled. A team principal on a short or ambiguous contract invites exactly the uncertainty that encourages a driver’s camp to look elsewhere. By committing to Mekies, the shareholders are also making a statement about the environment Verstappen will be driving in for 2027 and beyond.

The second is the power unit programme itself. Building an engine department from scratch requires long horizons. Engineers recruited from rival manufacturers want to know who they will be reporting to in three years, and partners such as Ford want continuity at the top. A team principal whose job appears to depend on the next three races cannot make the patient, unglamorous decisions that a young engine project needs.

The third is culture. Red Bull’s decline in 2024 and early 2025 was defined as much by the sense of a team divided against itself as by any aerodynamic misstep. Mekies’ main achievement has been removing that noise. Red Bull now reads as a racing team again rather than a corporate dispute with cars attached. That is difficult to quantify, and easy to lose. Unsettling it with a public question mark over the boss would have been a needless risk.

There is a structural argument as well. The junior team that Mekies left is fifth in the constructors’ championship on 100 points, comfortably clear of Alpine, with Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad both scoring regularly. Red Bull’s two-team structure appears to be functioning as a coherent pipeline rather than two separate fiefdoms, and Hadjar’s promotion and Lindblad’s arrival suggest the driver development system is working under the current leadership.

A builder’s contract with a 2027 deadline

On balance, the extension is deserved, though not for the reasons the more enthusiastic reaction suggests. Mekies has not restored Red Bull to the front. Mercedes has made this championship its own, and Red Bull’s best hope for the remainder of 2026 is to overhaul McLaren for third and add to Verstappen’s win tally. What Mekies has done is stabilise a team that was at genuine risk of fragmenting, keep its lead driver engaged, and guide a brand-new power unit through its debut season without the collapse many predicted.

Those are the achievements of a builder, and builders need time. The shareholders have bought that time. They have also, implicitly, accepted that the bill comes due in 2027, when the excuse of a first-year engine will no longer hold and the gap to Mercedes becomes the only metric that matters.

The next marker arrives quickly. Austin on 25 October, where Verstappen has historically gone well, opens a six-race run in which Red Bull needs only to outscore McLaren by eight points to claim third. Finishing ahead of a team that started 2026 as reigning champions would be a fair return on the faith just shown. Matching Mercedes over a full season next year is the result that will decide whether this contract looks shrewd or merely hopeful.