“It’s going to hurt at some stage”

“If you want to be competitive, you need to be on the edge. If you are on the edge, it is going to hurt at some stage. It’s meant to happen.” That’s how Oracle Red Bull Racing’s CEO and team principal Laurent Mekies described the discipline of learning through difficult moments during episode one of the Securing the Win podcast. 

The Milton Keynes outfit knows this well after 20 years in the championship: the toughest weekends deliver the most valuable lessons. And 2025 has delivered its fair share. 

“At every level of performance, it comes down to people,” 1Password CEO David Faugno said on the subject. “The pressure might look different in racing than it does in security, but the principle is the same — teams win when trust is built in, not added on. The first episode of Securing the Win is all about that: how great leaders create the conditions for their teams to move fast, stay confident, and perform at their best.”

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The team sits fourth in the constructors’ standings, a hefty 347 points behind McLaren after a stint of patchy performance from its RB21 and inconsistent results from the second car.

A fruitless home race in Austria only made matters worse, but the promotion of Mekies has seemingly triggered a reversal in its fortunes.

“It’s like if you have a business with publishing your earnings, instead of doing it every quarter, you do it every week,” he laughed opposite host and Oracle Red Bull Racing ambassador Calum Nicholas. “So that’s a little bit what it is. You have that race result where, whatever story you want to have in your head, this is the result. Nobody can challenge it. Sits on the ground, the world is watching it. And you have to deal with it whether you like it or whether you don’t like it.” 

But pressure isn’t corrosive in Formula 1. Instead, it’s clarifying for the likes of the team.

“I think as a human being and certainly as a group you learn a lot more in the difficult moment than in the good moment,” the Frenchman continued. “And in bad moments you have this… you are exposed. The world is seeing that somebody has done a better job than you as a group. And it is in this moment as competitors — because we are all deeply competitors —  you learn, and in that painful feeling that you learn, and that you move the lines to unlock some of the things that have been limiting you on that weekend.”

The Italian Grand Prix provided the perfect example for the energy drinks team chief, who watched from the pitlane as Max Verstappen provided the team with a perfect race weekend. Starting on pole beside McLaren’s Lando Norris, the Dutchman effortlessly dispatched the trailing competitors, finishing his Monza campaign with a 19-second lead. 

Only one year prior, Oracle Red Bull Racing endured one of the toughest Sundays it had seen in a long time with P6 and P8 finishes from its drivers. But this hurdle armed the team with the conviction it needed to redesign for Monza and turn a shortfall into a win just 12 months later. 

“As you know, Monza is a very specific track. You come here with your bespoke wings, bespoke set-up, bespoke where you run the car, blah, blah, blah. And last year was the most difficult race.

“And the guys did an amazing job looking back to last year, developing differently the car from last year for that very specific race. And they saw the result of their work 12 months after. And you go back there and you realise that you have made a huge step forward compared to the last year at that very track. 

“If we didn’t have such a bad race last year, there maybe would’ve had a less dramatic approach, and perhaps less progress.”

Living on this necessary knife edge means that sometimes things don’t land — an upgrade struggles to return the expected performance increase, a strategy unravels, or a setup that excelled in the simulator doesn’t translate to Sunday pace. The culture of the team has to survive this, and Mekies loved what he saw watching trackside. 

“It was fantastic to witness the team bringing new stuff to the race track, new parts for the car, and to see the team’s reactions when it was not working,” he said. “When something fails, we know it’s part of the game. So you don’t see finger pointing. You don’t see any of that, because you know that, yes, that stuff didn’t work. That stuff we cannot race here this weekend.

“But you know the women and the men behind it were on the very edge in the way they approach their topic, to extract as much performance as they could. And fine it didn’t work, but it’s very much because they had that approach, and what you want is to keep that approach and deal with the time where you fall.”

Essentially, a mistake has to be viewed from the point of view of an engineer, not a playwright. A culture of blame has no place in Oracle Red Bull Racing’s organisation, with its playbook instead opting for a strong support system that develops confidence.

“You try to have the best people possible. And once you have that — and obviously it’s very clear here you have the best people around you — you need to give them all the support you can give them. They may make the right decision or the bad decision in front of a given turning point. But what you will analyse is the process. What informations were available at the time? Why did we feel it was the right decisions for those moments? How can we filter down the information in a different way? What stopped us from making the right decisions?

“Our people need to be empowered,” he added. “Clear ownership of their area of responsibilities. If you do that, and you combine that with the endless desire we have to improve things, then that’s the way we tackle the fail.

“We get ourselves back in the room and replay the races, replay how we communicate. We listen to ourselves talking to each other. Why did we make the decisions there?”

With Mekies taking the reins after two decades of command by Christian Horner, the former Racing Bulls chief is keen to maintain a team that looks forward instead of back. But there is still the “harshness of racing,” says Mekies as he adds that these moments will keep happening.

“Do we account for failure? We shoot to be as close as possible from the limit. Yes, we know that that comes with a risk of failure, and we know that if we have the desire to analyse the roots of the failure and move away from anything that will be again finger-pointing. So focus on the solution, not on the problems, then we are progressing.”

Oracle Red Bull Racing budgets for difficult weekends, and after a few painful races, Monza was the cheque that has since helped balance the books. And while Verstappen is unlikely to realistically contend for this year’s drivers’ championship, Mekies believes this culture puts them in good stead for 2026, where the grid faces a new set of regulations and the squad will field its first-ever in-house power unit. 

For more from Mekies on his move to Oracle Red Bull Racing, dealing with pressure and the upcoming 2026 regulation changes, make sure to catch episode one of the Securing the Win podcast.

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