The Formula 1 silly season was stopped in its tracks when, shortly before August’s Dutch GP, Red Bull confirmed that Max Verstappen will be on board until at least 2030. While it always seemed likely that the four-times world champion would stay put for 2027 – assuming that he didn’t retire and walk away from the top level of the sport – the length of the commitment beyond next season came as a surprise.

The deal was a testimony to the persuasive powers of principal Laurent Mekies. While the financial terms were hammered out by Verstappen’s management and Red Bull big wig Oliver Mintzlaff, none of that was relevant unless the man himself was convinced that the team will have a competitive package in the coming years. It says a lot that despite the tricky start to 2026 under the new regulations, and amid the challenge of fielding the in-house Ford power unit, Mekies has convinced Verstappen that everything will fall into place.

The Frenchman’s managerial skills have been much in evidence since he was thrust into the limelight in July 2025 as the chosen successor to Christian Horner. It was never going to be an easy task – after two decades in the job Horner was Red Bull Racing, not just to the outside world but to the hundreds of employees in the organisation. But one way or another he had outstayed his welcome, and the top brass in Austria wanted change. Mekies brought fresh eyes and a different approach for the post-Horner and Adrian Newey era, and he was tasked with steering the ship back on course in the wake of the off-track distractions of the previous year or so.

“The summary would probably be a roller-coaster,” he reckons of his initial stint in the job. “The first few weeks were quite difficult. Not so much for me because as much as you will be obviously shocked and surprised, it’s a lot more difficult for the people, for your people, to try to deal with the news. And it wasn’t the first news, so a roller-coaster. Once that first phase passed, the people have been incredible in opening the doors and putting everything on the table, and making me feel welcome.

“You have to deal with the emotions of your people and the public”

“The first few weeks and months were only about trying to meet as many of these guys, trying to know them, trying to understand how this team was functioning. And the reaction of the team through that second part of the year after the difficult first part of the season, with all the events that had happened, has been incredible to us.”

From nowhere, Verstappen became a regular race winner and title challenger: “Nobody wanted to give up on the ’25 season. They wanted to prove their points. I think Pierre [Waché, technical director] had never really given up on the title, even at the lowest point, and that’s the way he and his team were looking at the season. And slowly but surely, the car started to work a bit better. Different sweet spots were found, and more development was brought to the car.”

In the end, Verstappen lost out to Lando Norris at the final round. Mekies concedes that the effort expended compromised the start to this year’s programme.“We are rational people outside of the moment of emotion of the races,” he considers. “And the truth is the slow start of the ’26 season is a direct product of a) how late we pushed last year – and in some respects, you also see it with our friends at McLaren, and we probably pushed even later than they did last year – and b) being on year one of a phenomenal project, which is the engine project. If you put these two things together, are you surprised that you start 1-1.2sec off the pace? Probably not fully surprised.

“I think what remains incredible is that once again, because this team is quite famous for that, how quickly we have managed to close the gap. Now we are not at 1.2sec, we are probably at three-tenths, and these last three-tenths are going to be the most difficult ones. But I think it showed again the quality of the team, the chassis side, PU side, with that racing spirit to press on. In that context, you get the highs and the lows of the way back to the top.

“Of course on the lows, you have to deal with the emotions of your drivers, your people and the public. That’s part of the game and I think we have to be honest with ourselves. If two weeks in a row you send your driver in the wall because of an issue with a car, you are going to get some emotions, regardless of where you are. We all have only one goal, it’s winning, and until we get there, we will not stop. As a team the only goal is winning, the drivers’ only goal is winning, and we push each other. And it’s a very direct relationship, and we want to keep it that way.”

But how did Mekies get here? His career path has been a series of carefully calculated steps, each adding to his knowledge and building up a remarkable CV.

“I’m lucky to have had the possibility to do so many jobs”

His interest in F1 was first sparked by watching races on TV with his father during the Senna/Prost era, and a visit to the 1988 French GP at Paul Ricard further fanned the flames of his passion. Looking for a way into the sport, Mekies opted for a mechanical engineering course at the prestigious ESTACA establishment in Paris. “At the time there was one university in France that was specifically close to motor racing,” he recalls. “The final year was done in the UK in Loughborough as an exchange programme, which was very advanced – they had a very nice automotive engineering department. And it allowed me to learn some words of English!”

That was followed by an internship with the Signature F3 team, whose main rivals included ASM, run by his future Ferrari colleague Fred Vasseur: “Signature was a 12-person team, something like that. I spent the 2000 season there. They were very good people and it was a very successful year – they won the French championship, they won Zandvoort [the Marlboro Masters]. It was a good way to learn.”

After the internship, Mekies saw an ad for a vacancy at Asiatech, the organisation that took over Peugeot’s F1 engine programme for the 2001 season and concluded a deal to supply Arrows: “I just sent my CV and I had an interview very quickly, like 10 days after. I was very surprised, nearly shaken and incredibly I got the job. And three weeks after, I was at Silverstone at a test session with Arrows, understanding nothing of what these guys were saying! Add three weeks to that and we were at Melbourne.”

That year he worked with Jos Verstappen and Enrique Bernoldi, before Asiatech transferred to Paul Stoddart’s Minardi team, where Mekies was part of Mark Webber’s debut season. When Asiatech pulled the plug, he stayed on at Minardi. “On reflection, F1 being such a specialist job, a hyper-specialist job, I got lucky,” he laughs. “I got to work as an engine engineer at the start, then when I switched to Minardi, I did a little bit of engine engineering, a little bit of control engineering – this was the time of traction control and all this stuff – and then I became a race engineer. I’m lucky to have had the possibility to do so many jobs. I think the reason is that every job I was doing, I was really bad at it. They kept moving me until they found something I could do properly! Which is still to happen, hopefully soon…”

In 2006 the team morphed into Scuderia Toro Rosso thanks to an influx of investment from Red Bull. “It was like changing team but staying at the same place,” recalls Mekies. “A completely different adventure started when Red Bull bought it. Very different ambitions, and finally access to the means we had dreamed of. A lot of good people came in. Then we were incredibly lucky to get Sebastian [Vettel] and he had an incredible start to his career there. And in 2007, ’08, he was really doing something more special every few races. It ended up with the Monza win, which feels extraordinary still now.”

In 2014, Mekies’ career took a completely different tack when he joined the FIA, initially in the role of safety director. Later he became F1 deputy race director, working alongside Charlie Whiting: “It was eight years at Toro Rosso, but if you add Minardi at the same Faenza base, I had been there for 11 years. I was really asking myself, ‘Do you want the same chapter again? Do you want the same chapter somewhere else? Or do you want to try something different?’ And I wanted to try something different.

“With the FIA I rediscovered motor sport. It’s not only F1, it’s not only your small team. You see everything that is incredible about motor sport, from the volunteers to the federations, and doing the safety jobs across all championships was just a massive learning experience. And being Charlie’s deputy was an incredible addition to that.”

The general idea was that Mekies would take over from Whiting. But he didn’t see a long-term future at the FIA and in 2018 switched direction to join Ferrari as sporting director, working (briefly) under Maurizio Arrivabene and then Mattia Binotto.

“The FIA offered everything I needed professionally in terms of love for the sport,” he says. “It did not offer the competitiveness aspect, which is a huge part of what gets us out of bed. If you have the opportunity to go back racing with Ferrari, you are always going to take the call. It felt like a dream come true. That’s how it felt, to stop in Maranello and to discover the Ferrari world, to discover the Ferrari passion. Even though I had been working for so many years in the sport, it still felt like a big shock again.

“The Maurizio cycle closed quite quickly after I arrived, and the Mattia cycle opened up, and to be at the beginning of that cycle with him and his team was an incredible adventure, something I can probably not compare to anything. Ultimately, we did not make it to the goal we had, which was to win the world championships. We finished second twice in these five years. So that’s probably the painful part, that ultimately we are here to try to win that title, and we failed. But the adventure was incredible.”