Who knows what riches Max Verstappen was offered to lure him away from Red Bull Racing? A blank cheque, the keys to any kingdom he might desire and all the fringe benefits imaginable, plus promises of untold glories, have the power to turn any driver’s head, especially if they’re struggling to win races. Yet despite those temptations, in August he agreed to a new deal to stay put until at least the end of 2030. No matter what exit clauses there are – and they do exist given the enormous leverage Verstappen has as Formula 1’s best driver – convincing him to put pen to paper is a resounding endorsement of a team badly in need of one.

Red Bull has been transformed. It long ago grew out of the edgy disruption of its youth, transitioning into the dominant twin peaks of its prime from 2010-13 and 2021-24, punctuated by the difficult years when its relationship with Renault broke down. With more than two decades on the clock, it has become something else in middle age: firmly a figure of the establishment whose domain it once brazenly gatecrashed. What’s not yet clear is whether this new incarnation retains the edge that made Red Bull so successful, and whether it can recapture that success.

Superficially, much is the same. The familiar colour scheme of dark blue, red and yellow remains and Max Verstappen continues to mock the laws of physics by dancing on the limits of the car’s potential, even if the results are subdued. That’s the guarantee you get from him, whether he has a car that can fight for the championship or, as has been the case so far in 2026, one capable only of second or third even on a good day.

When Verstappen signed his new deal, team principal Laurent Mekies described him as one of the pillars needed “to open that winning cycle again”, and identified “the best talents” throughout the organisation and “the number of strategic decisions made that we trust will give us a competitive advantage” as the other keystones. That latter point is revealing – Red Bull needed to prove to Verstappen that it was still capable of being the unbridled winning machine that allowed him to take four titles from 2021-24. He always wanted to stay, but it needed to be about more than just the loyalty that he prizes so much.

“Being part of this team already for such a long time, it’s definitely like a second family,” said Verstappen at the Belgian Grand Prix, just after confirmation of the deal extension. “We have won so much, and we have had so many incredible moments together. And then with Laurent joining last year, from the start the relationship has been really, really good; very open and transparent. And that’s why I think also from my side to make up my mind was just about exactly that: about the future, some strategic decisions as well within the team. For me, it feels absolutely right to continue here. And I always said, and I said this when Dietrich was still alive, my goal and target is to finish my career in this team, and we’re getting closer to that. So, that’s why I’m very proud to extend and try to get back to the top. We have tasted a lot of being on top; that’s why I think you are very hungry to try and get there again.”

The mention of Dietrich Mateschitz is significant, and is at the heart of understanding why the team is no longer as it once was. The Red Bull co-founder was the driving force behind its motor sport activities, but his death in October 2022 proved an inflection point for the F1 team. He was the alpha and omega of Red Bull’s operations in F1 and beyond; he held full management control despite owning 49% of the company to the co-founding Yoovidhya family’s 51%. His word was law, making him one of the last of the old-school autocratic team owners. As the head of two F1 teams, he wielded his enormous political power judiciously, economically and effectively, ensuring that, on the rare occasions he spoke publicly, his words advanced Red Bull’s cause. Yet while he had control over the F1 team, he never felt the need to flex that power on a day-to-day basis. Christian Horner, a bold appointment as team principal after Red Bull bought the ailing Jaguar team in late 2004, and long-time adviser Helmut Marko were his vicars on earth and had the autonomy to do things their way. Only occasionally did Mateschitz intervene, despite being engaged in what was happening.

“I always said my goal and target is to finish my career in this team”

Human nature abhors a power vacuum, and a struggle for control behind the scenes inevitably followed. Design genius Adrian Newey sought a fresh challenge; Horner battled for even more control and lost out with his eventual ousting in July 2025, which was the consequence of a power struggle rather than the very public controversy that engulfed him in early ’24. Mekies, promoted with no warning from leading Red Bull’s second team, Racing Bulls, has described the “shock” caused by Horner’s departure, and has been charged with leading the team into its new era. Even Marko was pushed out, albeit with the announcement allowing him to describe his departure as “the right moment” to move on. There were no winners, except for Red Bull GmbH itself, which has now exerted a more corporate, less individualistic power over its F1 operations.

Oliver Mintzlaff, Red Bull’s CEO of corporate projects, is the man at the top, and he has taken an active interest in the F1 team’s operation while keeping a low media profile. He wields some of the power Horner once did, with Mekies a diminished day-to-day boss not through any lack of ability, but through a narrower remit and the desire for there to be greater corporate oversight. As Mintzlaff puts it, “If we look purely at the racing, Laurent Mekies is the boss.” However, Red Bull has wrested control in other areas such as marketing, major personnel-appointment decisions and the big-picture strategy.

“We benefited from Max, the best driver in the world, but the truth is he owes a lot to Red Bull”

Corporate owners becoming too involved is always a concern in F1 because teams are highly specialised and can be weighed down by an excess of interference. They must wield power with a light touch, with full understanding of the people they are dealing with – and Mintzlaff and Verstappen took a little time to get onto the same page. In April last year, Mintzlaff’s public position was that “we benefited a lot from Max, the best driver in the world, but the truth is that he owes a lot to Red Bull”. That followed a year after Verstappen saved Marko from being axed by Red Bull thanks to a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave if such a move was made. But Mintzlaff and the Verstappen camp – Max, father Jos and manager Raymond Vermeulen – are now more closely aligned.

The jury is still out on how effective Mintzlaff is politically, an area where Horner and, when necessary, Mateschitz were potent forces. Indeed, given how the shaping of the ADUO system – the ‘additional development and upgrade opportunities’ to allow power unit development – played out, with Red Bull’s V6 being deemed the benchmark, it’s legitimate to ask whether Mintzlaff missed a trick. But with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem publicly backing the push for further changes on the power unit side to help struggling Honda and needing support from rival manufacturers, there’s a chance to fix that amid the horse-trading this will demand.

That the Red Bull Powertrains engine is good enough to be considered the best in F1 is remarkable in itself – and note that this applies only to the performance of the V6 internal combustion engine outside of the energy recovery systems that contribute 47% of the power, which explains why its Ford-badged power unit overall is not as strong as the Mercedes. Red Bull Powertrains is a brand-new operation and, while it invested in the best equipment and people, many poached from Mercedes including boss Ben Hodgkinson, there was no guarantee of success. But the ethos within the company matches that which made Red Bull’s F1 team so successful, namely an aggressive, free-thinking approach that is reckoned to be markedly different to the more conservative mindset within the Mercedes programme.

Returning to the chassis side, Verstappen’s reference to “strategic decisions” was deliberately oblique. The most obvious example is the new state-of-the-art wind tunnel, under construction at Red Bull’s Milton Keynes base, that will come online next year. Its current tunnel at Bedford has served the team well, and is at a very high level technologically, but is limited by its origins as, to use a phrase beloved by Horner, “a cold war relic”. There are some problems you can’t get around, notably the temperature sensitivity caused by the ageing structure, which makes the data unreliable below 5˚C or above 25˚C. Even within that temperature window, it’s not quite as high-fidelity as the latest tunnels in F1 used by teams such as McLaren and Aston Martin. It’s no surprise Red Bull has had correlation problems at times. But that wind-tunnel project was green-lit long ago, so there’s much more to this than that single big-ticket item.

Technically, Red Bull is stumbling down a rocky development road. It started the last regulations cycle in 2022 in all-conquering form, with Newey designing that year’s suspension around good mechanical platform control with minimal dive and pitch. This worked well, meaning the porpoising that blighted others wasn’t a limiting factor and, after some initial trouble from Ferrari, Verstappen dominated that season. Red Bull then steamrollered the opposition in 2023, winning 21 out of 22 races, with Verstappen taking the title again in 2024 as resurgent McLaren took the constructors’ crown. Red Bull’s failure that year was ascribed primarily to Sergio Pérez’s struggles in the second car, but that was only part of the story.

“It isn’t easy to pinpoint one exact problem. It might be a few things”

McLaren pushed to run at lower ride heights, unlocking more performance potential once it got porpoising under control, while Red Bull was trapped by the ceiling of its own concept. And, as Verstappen stressed repeatedly, even when it was winning easily, the characteristics that would become a problem in 2024 and ’25 were already a limiting factor. Today there are still problems with car balance and ride that blunt Red Bull’s sharpest weapon – Verstappen. While the chassis rules changed completely this year, the processes and tools used to design the car remain, and some stubborn problems remain.

“Some things carried over from the previous cars,” says Verstappen. “I was complaining about the ride on the kerbs before and I’m still complaining about it, so there are things that we are looking into, to try and fix. But the answer is not very clear or straightforward, otherwise we would have fixed those things. Performance can be very complicated and it isn’t easy to pinpoint one exact problem, because it might be a few things that come together that create a problem. You need to figure out all those details on the car to try and be better.”

Red Bull still has much to prove in the post-Newey era. While he was not the sole architect of its success, he played a key role even at times when there were attempts to downplay it. Indeed, after leaving he gently railed against suggestions he was not that engaged in F1, underlining the fact that he remained influential. But designing and developing an F1 car is a collaborative task and there is still enormous depth on that side at Red Bull. Technical director Pierre Waché has played a crucial part, taking over that role in 2018 and working with Newey until the design legend left and, while he had strong support from Verstappen, this must have been shaken by the stuttering progress in recent years. While its car is no longer limited by the narrow operating window that hindered Verstappen two years ago, this still hasn’t been sufficiently widened, which points to ghosts in the machine that must be run down.