The question remaining after Lambiase's shock Red Bull exit

There was a moment in the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix that perfectly captured Gianpiero Lambiase and his relationship with Max Verstappen.

Verstappen had been pushing back, wanting to know whether both Red Bull cars were being asked to follow the same strategy, unwilling to comply with an instruction he hadn’t been given the full reasoning for.

“You just follow my instruction,” Lambiase said.

“No, I want to know if both cars do it,” Verstappen replied.

“Max, please follow my instruction and trust it. Thank you.”

It is a strange kind of authority that could silence Verstappen, and Lambiase managed it in one sentence.

Lambiase didn’t explain, didn’t negotiate, didn’t escalate. He simply told Verstappen to trust him and closed the conversation.

Later, with the race run and the point made, he allowed himself one more line: “I’d ask you to use your head a bit more.”

Very few people in the world can talk to Max Verstappen like that.

From 2028, that voice will belong to McLaren.

The news that Lambiase will leave Red Bull at the end of next season, having accepted what sources describe as an astronomical offer from the Woking-based team, is the latest tremor in Red Bull’s ongoing institutional earthquake.

That framing isn’t an exaggeration, and it might even undersell what is actually being lost, and what the move might ultimately mean for the most talented driver in Formula 1.

The making of a partnership

Lambiase joined Red Bull’s senior programme in 2015, taking over as Verstappen’s race engineer five races into the 2016 season after the teenager’s promotion from Toro Rosso.

Verstappen arrived at Red Bull as one of the most hyped prospects the sport had seen in years, so the relationship between driver and engineer had to be built from almost nothing under significant scrutiny.

What emerged was one of the F1’s great partnerships, not because it was always harmonious, but because it was honest and produced incredible performances as well as results.

Lambiase has never treated Verstappen as a talent to be managed carefully. He treated him as a professional who could handle direct information delivered without ceremony, as the exchange above exemplifies.

Verstappen, who has little patience for anything he perceives as softening or spin, has often responded in kind.

The result was a working relationship built on a foundation of mutual bluntness that, over time, became mutual trust and respect.

The radio exchanges became famous, often clipped and circulated for the friction they contained. It’s the moments where Verstappen’s frustration and Lambiase’s composure grated against each other audibly.

But those clips, as is often the case with F1 radios isolated from their context, misread what they were showing.

A driver screaming into his radio and an engineer responding with calm precision is not always a sign of dysfunction. It is, in the right context, something close to an ideal, and Lambiase gave Verstappen a fixed point.

Lambiase is someone who wouldn’t escalate, wouldn’t flinch, and wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. And it simply worked.

Four titles together

As the relationship continued to mature, so did the championships accumulate.

Lambiase has been a central figure in Verstappen’s success, working alongside the Dutchman since his promotion to Red Bull’s senior team from Toro Rosso.

They have scored 71 grand prix wins and four drivers’ championships together, putting them only behind Lewis Hamilton and Peter Bonnington on the list of the most successful partnerships.

But the numbers alone don’t capture the full essence of what those successes required.

The 2021 title fight with Hamilton was the most psychologically brutal championship in the modern era, a season that ended in Abu Dhabi under circumstances that still provoke argument, and that demanded extraordinary steadiness from everyone around Verstappen in its final weeks. Lambiase was there for every lap of it.

The 2022 and 2023 seasons brought a different kind of pressure: the pressure of dominance, of managing a driver who is at his most dangerous when he is bored or underloaded.

The 2023 car was so fast that the challenge became keeping Verstappen focused across a season that was, in competitive terms, over by August.

As the Belgian GP radio communication from above shows, Verstappen isn’t easy to manage even during a season in which he won 19 races.

The radio exchanges from that year occasionally made uncomfortable listening, but the relationship held, and held in a way that suggested it had been stress-tested enough to know its own limits.

Within Red Bull, Lambiase also serves as head of racing, a dual role that speaks to his standing within the organisation as something more than a race-day operative.

He has been, for several years, one of the most influential figures in the team, as much an architect of Red Bull’s operational culture as a voice in Verstappen’s ear.

The question that remains

Which brings the question to Verstappen himself, and here the stakes become harder to read clearly.

He is contracted to Red Bull until the end of 2028. He is considering walking away from Formula 1 due to his displeasure with the new regulations, a threat he has made with enough consistency and enough supporting detail that it cannot simply be dismissed as noise.

And now the engineer who has been beside him for every lap of his championship career will, in 2028, be sitting on the McLaren pitwall instead in a role that has yet to be defined.

The situation has to be uncomfortable for Red Bull in a way that goes beyond sentiment.

Lambiase knows Verstappen better than almost anyone in the paddock. He knows how he communicates under pressure, what information he needs and when, which interventions help and which make things worse. That knowledge will soon belong to McLaren, and to whichever drivers McLaren has in its car.