Pink Bull Racing's secret weapon? An engineer who treats workflows like lap occasions

[ad_1] There’s a second backstage at Net Summit when a member of the manufacturing crew — simply twice the dimensions 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 particular person to guide Pink Bull Racing in its 20-year historical past.

“The primary feeling is considered one of being privileged, being honored, to all of the sudden be a part of such an unimaginable group,” Mekies later tells me onstage in French-accented English. “This group has been profitable greater than anybody else in System One within the final 20 years. After which all of the sudden you might be a part of it.”

“Abruptly” shouldn't be an overstatement. As broadly reported, the wholly surprising name got here in July. Christian Horner, the outspoken government who had led Pink Bull since its entry into F1 in 2005, was out. Mekies, who had been operating the group’s sister outfit, Racing Bulls, for simply over a 12 months, was tapped to step up.

Mekies was an unbelievable selection in some methods. The place Horner delights within the media highlight and gamesmanship that defines F1 group principals, Mekies spent a lot of his profession within the engineering trenches. His strategy to profitable displays that technical background, too; he sees efficiency good points not simply in aerodynamics and tire compounds, however in eliminating friction from workflows and processes.

That philosophy extends to the group’s partnerships. Take 1Password, the cybersecurity firm whose CEO, David Faugno, sits beside Mekies and me on the Net 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 group may appear to be an odd match. Safety, in spite of everything, normally means friction. Passwords to test, techniques to authenticate, workflows that sluggish folks 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 folks must handle and log in and sign off of advanced techniques — aerodynamics, automobile dynamics on the monitor, again on the manufacturing facility, on the simulator, within the wind tunnel . . . We go right this moment quicker on this seamless login and logout of our folks from one system to a different than what we had been doing with out the safety degree.”

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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 folks — they're difficult us day by day in regards to the noise that's considerably unavoidable for a big group. With 1Password, now we have this kind of reply the place we cut back the noise, enhance the time for the core enterprise, and that’s essentially the place the efficiency comes from.”

From engineer to CEO

At 48, Mekies has seen System 1 from practically each angle. After finding out at ESTACA, an engineering college in Paris, and Loughborough College within the U.Ok., he began in System 3 in 2000 earlier than crossing into F1 with a British racing group known as Arrows in 2001. He then joined Minardi, an Italian group, in 2003 as a race engineer. When Pink Bull purchased the struggling outfit and reworked it into Toro Rosso in 2006 — the concept was to create a junior group 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’Car (FIA), the rulemaker for System 1 and different motorsport sequence 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 group (renamed Racing Bulls in 2024).

Mekies brings a breadth of expertise to the position, in brief. What he doesn’t convey — not but, no less than — is numerous ego. When Verstappen gained 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 Net Summit, Mekies shrugs. “All we do as leaders is put our folks in place to have the ability to categorical their skills. So it is vitally a lot their win.”

Mekies sees his position in another way than his high-profile predecessor, in reality. He isn’t intentionally attempting to “lead from behind.” As an alternative, he tells me onstage that he doesn’t “assume the strategy issues. I don’t assume it’s management fashion. You'll find each potential fashion in management. I feel what issues in management is look after the folks and a care-for-the-company tradition.”

Certainly, whereas Mekies may actually bathe consideration on his star driver (Mekies desires to retain him in spite of everything), he’s extra targeted on the collective. “Your first ideas are for the two,000 folks again within the factories who've by no means given up on this season,” he says. “It takes an incredible quantity of power, of firm tradition, to maintain that motivation and that preventing spirit.”

Humility doesn’t imply taking part in it protected, by the way in which. The Monza win additionally validated a considerably shocking determination: to maintain pushing on the 2025 automobile quite than abandoning it for subsequent 12 months’s improvement. “We weren't comfortable about the place the automobile efficiency had been at the start of this 12 months and up till the center of this 12 months,” 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 fascinated about how every part shall be higher subsequent 12 months.”

It was a dangerous name. With utterly new rules coming in 2026 — new chassis guidelines, new energy unit rules — most groups had already shifted assets to subsequent 12 months’s automobile. However Mekies felt his group wanted to grasp what had gone unsuitable earlier than they might transfer ahead. “We felt we needed to resolve what had not been working,” he says. “We maybe pushed a bit greater than a few of the competitors. And by chance, it gave us this turnaround in type.”

Now the group heads into winter with much less improvement 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 aren't any different phrases to explain subsequent 12 months apart from as a loopy problem. That’s how large it's for us.”

For a way of what the group is taking up, right here’s how Mekies describes it on stage: “We're going to do our personal energy unit with the help from Ford, and we're going to compete in opposition to folks which have been manufacturing System One engines for greater than 90 years. It’s the kind of loopy degree that solely Pink Bull can do. We’ve determined to create in a single day services in the course of a subject in Milton Keynes [a large town about 50 miles northwest of London] within the U.Ok. from zero — get the constructing, get the dynos in [which are massive, sophisticated test rigs], rent 600 folks, attempt to get them to work collectively, finally attempt to get an engine and get it on top of things to succeed in the monitor.”

Can he promise Verstappen a championship-winning automobile subsequent 12 months? Once I ask Mekies, he solutions straightaway. “We'd be foolish to assume that we simply go in there and are going to be on the proper degree immediately. This isn't going to occur,” he says. “However we take it the Pink Bull method. We take it with all of the high-risk, high-gain strategy that we cherish.”

He has motive for optimism. Sitting third on this 12 months’s F1 group standings, simply behind Mercedes, Pink Bull has a practical shot at overtaking them for second place within the remaining three races of this 12 months’s season. It’s a far cry from the dominance Pink Bull loved lately, however given how the season began, it will characterize 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 remaining races. His reply is usually methodical.

“We at all times 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 suitable window,” which means the slim vary of situations the place a automobile performs optimally, “and struggle for the win.”

It’s “extremely tough to struggle at that degree,” he continues, “however everybody in Milton Keynes has been doing such an incredible job to show the automobile round and to offer us a aggressive bundle for the tip of the season.”

Within the meantime, he insists that he’s not wanting on the factors tables or the what-ifs. “We don’t have a look at the numbers. We all know there's a lot occurring within the [F1 team standings], however we solely have a look at it race by race.”