There’s a second backstage at Internet Summit when a member of the manufacturing crew — simply twice the scale of Laurent Mekies — wraps a beefy arm across the Oracle Pink Bull Racing CEO’s shoulder and steers him towards the soundboard to retrieve his telephone for a selfie. Most executives main 2,000-person organizations would bristle on the informality, even from a superfan. Mekies as a substitute smiles, his demeanor unchanged as he accommodates the starstruck crew member.
It’s a small second however maybe a revealing one about Mekies who, simply 4 months in the past, turned solely the second individual to guide Pink Bull Racing in its 20-year historical past.
“The primary feeling is one among being privileged, being honored, to immediately be a part of such an unimaginable crew,” Mekies later tells me onstage in French-accented English. “This crew has been profitable greater than anybody else in System One within the final 20 years. After which immediately you might be a part of it.”
“Immediately” shouldn’t be an overstatement. As extensively reported, the wholly sudden name got here in July. Christian Horner, the outspoken govt who had led Pink Bull since its entry into F1 in 2005, was out. Mekies, who had been operating the crew’s sister outfit, Racing Bulls, for simply over a yr, was tapped to step up.
Mekies was an inconceivable selection in some methods. The place Horner delights within the media highlight and gamesmanship that defines F1 crew principals, Mekies spent a lot of his profession within the engineering trenches. His strategy to profitable displays that technical background, too; he sees efficiency positive aspects not simply in aerodynamics and tire compounds, however in eliminating friction from workflows and processes.
That philosophy extends to the crew’s partnerships. Take 1Password, the cybersecurity firm whose CEO, David Faugno, sits beside Mekies and me on the Internet Summit stage. Faugno took over his personal iconic model 4 months in the past — the identical week as Mekies.
The partnership between a cybersecurity firm and an F1 crew would possibly look like an odd match. Safety, in any case, often means friction. Passwords to verify, techniques to authenticate, workflows that gradual individuals down. In F1, the place thousandths of a second matter, that’s unacceptable.
However that’s precisely why Mekies sees 1Password as integral to Pink Bull’s aggressive edge. “Our individuals must handle and log in and log off of complicated techniques — aerodynamics, automobile dynamics on the observe, again on the manufacturing unit, on the simulator, within the wind tunnel . . . We go right this moment sooner on this seamless login and logout of our individuals from one system to a different than what we have been doing with out the safety stage.”
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It’s a small aggressive benefit, however in F1, small benefits compound. “You’re looking after the tiniest aggressive benefit, one after the opposite,” Mekies notes. “Our tech genius, our individuals — they’re difficult us day by day in regards to the noise that’s considerably unavoidable for a big crew. With 1Password, we’ve this type of reply the place we cut back the noise, enhance the time for the core enterprise, and that’s basically the place the efficiency comes from.”
From engineer to CEO
At 48, Mekies has seen System 1 from practically each angle. After learning at ESTACA, an engineering college in Paris, and Loughborough College within the U.Okay., he began in System 3 in 2000 earlier than crossing into F1 with a British racing crew known as Arrows in 2001. He then joined Minardi, an Italian crew, in 2003 as a race engineer. When Pink Bull purchased the struggling outfit and reworked it into Toro Rosso in 2006 — the thought was to create a junior crew to develop younger drivers like Max Verstappen for Pink Bull Racing — Mekies was promoted to chief engineer.
Mekies stayed for eight years earlier than transferring on to change into security director on the Fédération Internationale de l’Vehicle (FIA), the rulemaker for System 1 and different motorsport collection worldwide. There, he reportedly championed the titanium security system that’s mounted above the cockpit of System 1 vehicles to guard the driving force’s head — the “halo” system. Then it was on to Ferrari as deputy race director, and 5 years later, again to Pink Bull’s junior racing crew (renamed Racing Bulls in 2024).
Mekies brings a breadth of expertise to the function, briefly. What he doesn’t deliver — not but, a minimum of — is quite a lot of ego. When Verstappen received the 2025 Italian Grand Prix at Monza in September in what turned the quickest race in F1 historical past, reporters requested Mekies about his contribution to the victory. His reply was self-effacing: “I’ve zero contribution.” When the reporters laughed, he added, “I’m not kidding.”
Once I ask about that second on stage at Internet Summit, Mekies shrugs. “All we do as leaders is put our individuals in place to have the ability to specific their abilities. So it is rather a lot their win.”
Mekies sees his function in a different way than his high-profile predecessor, in reality. He isn’t intentionally making an attempt to “lead from behind.” As an alternative, he tells me onstage that he doesn’t “suppose the strategy issues. I don’t suppose it’s management type. You will see that each attainable type in management. I believe what issues in management is take care of the individuals and a care-for-the-company tradition.”
Certainly, whereas Mekies may definitely bathe consideration on his star driver (Mekies desires to retain him in any case), he’s extra targeted on the collective. “Your first ideas are for the two,000 individuals again within the factories who’ve by no means given up on this season,” he says. “It takes an amazing quantity of vitality, of firm tradition, to maintain that motivation and that preventing spirit.”
Humility doesn’t imply enjoying it protected, by the best way. The Monza win additionally validated a considerably stunning determination: to maintain pushing on the 2025 automobile reasonably than abandoning it for subsequent yr’s growth. “We weren’t glad about the place the automobile efficiency had been at first of this yr and up till the center of this yr,” Mekies tells me. “We determined to press on a bit extra with 2025. We didn’t really feel that we may merely flip the web page and have wishful interested by how every thing will probably be higher subsequent yr.”
It was a dangerous name. With fully new rules coming in 2026 — new chassis guidelines, new energy unit rules — most groups had already shifted sources to subsequent yr’s automobile. However Mekies felt his crew wanted to know what had gone incorrect earlier than they might transfer ahead. “We felt we needed to unravel what had not been working,” he says. “We maybe pushed a bit greater than a number of the competitors. And fortunately, it gave us this turnaround in kind.”
Now the crew heads into winter with much less growth time than its rivals, “however with much more belief in our instruments, in our methodologies, in our course of,” Mekies says.
Driving ahead
If Mekies’ 2025 turnaround was dangerous, 2026 represents one thing else: a “loopy journey,” as Mekies describes how Pink Bull is constructing its personal energy unit for the primary time, in partnership with Ford. (It has relied on Honda-based engines since 2019.) “For Oracle Pink Bull Racing, there are not any different phrases to explain subsequent yr apart from as a loopy problem. That’s how large it’s for us.”
For a way of what the crew is taking over, right here’s how Mekies describes it on stage: “We’re going to do our personal energy unit with the assist from Ford, and we’re going to compete towards individuals which were manufacturing System One engines for greater than 90 years. It’s the type of loopy stage that solely Pink Bull can do. We’ve determined to create in a single day services in the course of a discipline in Milton Keynes [a large town about 50 miles northwest of London] within the U.Okay. from zero — get the constructing, get the dynos in [which are massive, sophisticated test rigs], rent 600 individuals, attempt to get them to work collectively, ultimately attempt to get an engine and get it up to the mark to achieve the observe.”
Can he promise Verstappen a championship-winning automobile subsequent yr? Once I ask Mekies, he solutions straightaway. “We might be foolish to suppose that we simply go in there and are going to be on the proper stage immediately. This isn’t going to occur,” he says. “However we take it the Pink Bull means. We take it with all of the high-risk, high-gain strategy that we cherish.”
He has cause for optimism. Sitting third on this yr’s F1 crew standings, simply behind Mercedes, Pink Bull has a sensible shot at overtaking them for second place within the last three races of this yr’s season. It’s a far cry from the dominance Pink Bull loved lately, however given how the season began, it will signify a significant restoration.
Backstage earlier than our dialog, as make-up artists powder us for the stage lights, I ask Mekies in regards to the strain of these last races. His reply is often methodical.
“We all the time say that we take it race by race. In order that’s what we’re going to do within the subsequent three races,” he tells me. “You wish to flip up on the racetrack, put the automobile in the precise window,” which means the slender vary of situations the place a automobile performs optimally, “and battle for the win.”
It’s “extremely troublesome to battle at that stage,” he continues, “however everybody in Milton Keynes has been doing such an amazing job to show the automobile round and to offer us a aggressive package deal for the tip of the season.”
Within the meantime, he insists that he’s not trying on the factors tables or the what-ifs. “We don’t take a look at the numbers. We all know there’s a lot taking place within the [F1 team standings], however we solely take a look at it race by race.”
That’s the “solely factor we do,” he says, describing Pink Bull’s mission. “Chasing lap occasions.”
