When Gianpiero Lambiase walks into the McLaren factory sometime in 2028 to become its new chief racing officer, he will be far from the first person to make that journey from Milton Keynes.
That in itself is significant, as his arrival represents the latest transfer of talent from Red Bull to McLaren.
Despite his high profile, Lambiase’s move isn’t even the most consequential Red Bull to McLaren switch, given the importance of some of the people the team has lost to its Woking rival. But it leads to a question the Milton Keynes-based squad’s leadership may end up asking themselves: at what point does the team that won four consecutive constructors’ championships become something else entirely?
Some might argue with good reason that that point has already passed.
The confirmation that Lambiase will leave Red Bull at the end of 2027, having accepted a reported ‘astronomical offer’ from McLaren, landed on Thursday as the latest in a sequence of departures that have hollowed out one of the most successful operations in Formula 1 history.
But context matters here, as Lambiase is not heading to a midfield team or into retirement.
He is heading to McLaren, the same team that has, over the past two years, quietly and methodically acquired part of what made Red Bull great.
There is no evidence of a coordinated raid, no masterplan drawn up in Woking to systematically strip Red Bull of its intellectual capital, but it must still hurt.
What there is, instead, is something more mundane and in some ways more damning for Red Bull: McLaren has simply been a more attractive destination.
The architect
Marshall joined McLaren from Red Bull in 2024
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Rob Marshall spent over two decades at Red Bull, rising to become chief designer, one of the central technical figures behind the RB18 and RB19, the cars that delivered back-to-back constructors’ titles and the most dominant single season in F1’s modern era.
When he left Milton Keynes in 2023, it was not amid acrimony or crisis. It was, by most accounts, a straightforward decision by a highly valued professional that a new challenge was available and the timing was right.
Marshall arrived in Woking ahead of the 2024 season, bringing with him not just his own considerable expertise but an intimate understanding of the design philosophy that had made Red Bull’s car so devastatingly effective.
The extent to which his contribution has fed into McLaren’s subsequent competitiveness is difficult to isolate, as car performance is always a collective achievement, but the correlation between his arrival and McLaren’s emergence as a genuine title contender and world champion can’t be ignored.
The strategist
Courtenay had been with Red Bull for over a decade
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Will Courtenay’s departure followed a similar pattern.
As Red Bull’s head of strategy, Courtenay had been one of the key operational minds behind the team’s dominance — the person responsible for the race-day decision-making that repeatedly gave Verstappen the edge he needed.
He, too, left for McLaren, joining a team that was already building momentum and needed the kind of experience that cannot be manufactured quickly.
Strategy is perhaps the most transferable of Formula 1’s dark arts.
The principles are consistent across teams; what differs is the depth of experience, the instinct developed across hundreds of race weekends, the ability to make high-stakes calls with incomplete information and live with the consequences.
Courtenay took all of that to McLaren. Red Bull, meanwhile, had to rebuild.
The engineer
Lambiase is the latest big name to leave Red Bull
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And now it’s Lambiase who will be going to McLaren.
Currently serving as Red Bull’s head of racing in addition to his duties on the pitwall, his departure represents something qualitatively different from Marshall’s or Courtenay’s.
Not because his technical contribution is necessarily greater, but because of what he carries with him that cannot be written down or transferred in a briefing document: a decade of working with Max Verstappen.
An understanding of how that particular driver thinks, communicates, and performs under pressure, that is, at this point, probably unmatched by anyone outside Verstappen’s immediate family.
That knowledge will soon sit in the McLaren garage.
The backdrop
To understand the full weight of what McLaren has accumulated, it is necessary to set it against what Red Bull has lost more broadly.
Marshall, Courtenay and Lambiase are the McLaren story, but they are not the whole story of Red Bull’s dismantling.
Adrian Newey, Jonathan Wheatley and Helmut Marko all left, while Christian Horner was replaced by Laurent Mekies.
Newey is now at Aston Martin, Wheatley went to Audi and now appears to be moving to Aston Martin, and Marko and his influence are gone as well.
The exits don’t all share the same cause. Some were driven by the internal turbulence that followed the Horner saga and the subsequent restructuring of the team’s leadership.
Questions about Verstappen’s future will inevitably continue
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Some were straightforward career moves by individuals who had achieved everything available to them at Red Bull and were ready for a new chapter.
The common thread is not a single crisis but an accumulation: a team that, for a variety of reasons, has found it increasingly difficult to hold onto the people who made it exceptional.
What remains
McLaren hasn’t had its recent success on Red Bull’s exiles alone. The reigning world champions completed a championship double in 2025, and the foundations of that achievement run deeper than any individual signing, however significant.
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Marshall, Courtenay, and soon Lambiase are contributors to a wider project, not the sole explanation for a team that has been building momentum since long before the first Milton Keynes defector arrived in Woking.
But the direction of travel is unmistakable. Red Bull built something extraordinary across the first half of this decade, a team culture, a technical philosophy, a set of processes and people that produced results the sport had rarely seen.
That culture is now dispersed. Its most important architects are, one by one, applying what they learned elsewhere.
Fortunately for Red Bull, one name conspicuously absent from that list is Verstappen himself.
The four-time world champion is contracted to Red Bull until the end of 2028 but has been considering walking away from Formula 1 altogether, his frustration with the 2026 regulations well documented.
Whether he sees out that contract, leaves early, or steps away from the sport entirely, his future is now being shaped by an environment from which almost every familiar face has gone.
The team that lines up on the grid in 2028 will carry the Red Bull name and the Red Bull colours. Whether it carries anything else from the dynasty that Newey designed, Horner led, Marko nurtured and Lambiase helped to operate for the better part of a decade is a harder question to answer.
