Helmut Marko has stated that Red Bull has already identified Gianpiero Lambiase’s replacement, who will leave the Milton Keynes team at the end of the 2027 season, by recruiting a figure from Ferrari.
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The Milton Keynes-based team is thus set to lose, in just over a year, another key element who has played a major role not only in its successes of the last decade, but also in building one of Formula 1’s most iconic driver-engineer duos alongside Max Verstappen.
The Italian-British engineer is indeed set to join McLaren as Chief Racing Officer, under the direct leadership of Andrea Stella, allowing the Woking-based team to make another strategic move after already attracting profiles like Rob Marshall and Will Courtenay from Red Bull in recent years.
Red Bull anticipates
Speaking to OE24, Helmut Marko emphasized that high-performing individuals inevitably attract the interest of rival teams, noting that Lambiase’s visibility has significantly increased thanks to his work alongside Verstappen. He also revealed that Red Bull had already taken the lead in securing a replacement from Ferrari.
“High-performing individuals are always poached; Lambiase gained media exposure thanks to Max. For this, a replacement has been recruited from Ferrari,” he declared, implying that Red Bull was not caught off guard by this announcement. The Austrian, however, refrained from revealing the identity of this recruit, maintaining a certain mystery around the person concerned from Maranello.
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This could be Andrea Landi, current Deputy Technical Director of Racing Bulls after having been in charge of performance at Ferrari. He will take on this responsibility within the RBR structure from July 1st alongside Ben Waterhouse, also a former Faenza employee. In short, musical chairs at the Red Bull team.
Back and forth
In a constantly evolving market, personnel turnover between teams is more fluid than ever, sometimes with inextricable situations to resolve regarding notice periods, the famous “gardening leave”, during which the poached technician cannot yet take up their new duties while already having been sidelined by their previous employer.
In this context, some engineers move their bags from left to right, to the point of sometimes returning to square one, as was recently the case for Dan Fallows. The transfer of Adrian Newey’s former assistant, who moved from Red Bull to Aston Martin before his master, took months of negotiations only to ultimately fall through when the reference designer changed camps.
What then became of Fallows? He made the reverse journey, returning to Milton Keynes where he now holds coordination roles between engineering and the aerodynamics department on behalf of Racing Bulls, the sister team, which has a strong technical hub adjacent to the Red Bull Racing campus.
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