Ferrari mocked, flop in Maranello won in Red Bull: "But I wanted to stay"

Ferrari has experienced a nightmarish 2025, with no wins to its credit and with Lewis Hamilton even failing to get not even a podium finish (compared to Charles Leclerc’s seven). With the season now definitively in the archives, however, mockeries continue to be added to the already numerous damages that have marked the Cavallino team’s last few months. The’latest concerns statements by a figure who has ended up repeatedly in the eye of the storm for the Rosse&#8217s faltering results, but who has revived after being torpedoed, bidding farewell to Maranello and moving to Red Bull: Laurent Mekies.

Marco Enzo Venturini

Linked in the collective imagination to the management of Frederic Vasseur, Mekies has actually worked at Ferrari since September 2018. It was not until 2023, however, that he became a central figure in the team, with some strategic choices made that season drawing widespread criticism. After the Hungarian Grand Prix two years ago, therefore, he left Maranello and moved to nearby Faenza, transforming himself into the new team principal of the Racing Bulls from 2024. Christian Horner’s problems in the “parent company” however, made it possible for him to move to Red Bull to fill the same role from July 9, 2025.

Data in hand, it is impossible not to note that it was precisely in correspondence with his arrival that Red Bull’s comeback that ignited the second half of the 2025 Formula 1 World Championship took shape. Indeed, the Mekies management saw no fewer than six victories by Max Verstappen, who was able to finish the season just two points behind world champion Lando Norris. In the same months, however, Ferrari was trudging along. And the French engineer meanwhile confessed that his intentions were not to leave the Cavallino. “In Maranello I had a wonderful experience. Plus I had a very close relationship with Vasseur, it would have been nice to stay. But they offered me to be team principal in Racing Bulls, it was a train not to be missed”, his words collected by the ‘Corriere della Sera’.

So Ferrari finds itself having to watch another of its former employees reap satisfaction and success elsewhere. With every intention, moreover, of confirming himself in the near future. “In Red Bull we have lost time with the development of the 2026 single-seater. And we know that at’the beginning there will be pain, but we are working on it”, Mekies has already stated.

All this while in Ferrari we continue to lick our wounds for a 2025 to forget, and still raging the case of Lewis Hamilton and his poor performance during his first season in Red. Meanwhile, however, 2026 is around the corner, and the competition is at work. In many cases, with faces that have become familiar from Maranello (think of the McLaren driven by Andrea Stella).