Overview
- Zak Brown met Laurent Mekies and Oliver Mintzlaff in the Red Bull camp on Sunday in Miami, and both teams said they did not want a public back-and-forth.
- The flare-up followed Mekies saying on Friday that Gianpiero Lambiase would be a team principal at McLaren, a claim Brown rejected on air.
- McLaren says Lambiase will join no later than 2028 as Chief Racing Officer reporting to team principal Andrea Stella.
- Lambiase is Red Bull’s head of racing and Max Verstappen’s race engineer, so his exit would take hard-won trackside know-how to a rival.
- Red Bull says it has a succession plan that favors internal promotion and targeted hires, citing recent moves for Ben Waterhouse and Andrea Landi.