What Red Bull F1 team should be most “worried about” after Gianpiero Lambiase exit

Red Bull should be “worried about” losing further key personnel following the exit of Gianpiero Lambiase, Karun Chandhok has warned.

Max Verstappen’s long-serving race engineer Lambiase has agreed to join McLaren in 2028 when his current Red Bull contract expires in a shock move that was confirmed last week.

The British-Italian engineer is the latest high-profile figure to leave Red Bull in recent years, and the third to join McLaren, following Rob Marshall and former head of race strategy Will Courtenay.

Red Bull has also lost chief technical Adrian Newey and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley since the start of 2024, while former team principal Christian Horner was sacked last July, and top advisor Helmut Marko left at the end of the 2025 season.

Lambiase’s impending exit has raised further questions about Verstappen’s future, and also brought the wider culture within the Red Bull team into the spotlight.

“For whatever reason this brain drain has gone on, and a cultural shift absolutely has happened throughout the organisation with all the names that have gone,” former F1 driver Chandhok told the Sky Sports F1 Show podcast.

“There’s a big job there for Laurent Mekies and the ownership from Red Bull Austria to figure out how they’re going to stop this, and how they make themselves attractive.

“Right now, you want to attract the people from Mercedes; they’re the ones winning. I think one of the things that they’ve got to be worried about is that good people attract other good people.

“How long before GP starts calling the other 20 people who are sitting in that engineering office and saying, ‘Hey, you know what? This place down at Woking, this is a really nice place to work. How do you fancy coming down here?’

“All of a sudden, how long before that core group starts to break up? And we’ve seen it so many times that Adrian Newey went from team to team to team and dragged good people. Ross Brawn did the same.

“I think that’s something Red Bull really need to be worried about, this thing of they need a big name signing, not just for the skill set that that person can bring, but the people that they will attract.”

Sky Sports F1 commentator David Croft suggested Red Bull needs a “big name signing” to quell the current negative talk surrounding the team.

“It’s not people deserting a sinking ship, but it’s people thinking that their success in their careers can lie elsewhere outside of Milton Keynes,” Croft said.

“For many, many years, that was never the case. People were loyal to Red Bull, loyal to Christian Horner, and loyal to the overall game of winning championships.

“Red Bull have not always been the most successful team on the grid. It’s peaks and troughs. And at the moment, they’re heading towards a bit of a trough and need to recruit. They could do with a big name signing, but I don’t know who that will be.”