Although the 2025 Formula 1 title fight went down to the final race in Abu Dhabi, the tension in the paddock was completely different than in 2021. Four years ago, the atmosphere between Red Bull and Mercedes was hostile at times, even though Max Verstappen laughed it off at the 2025 finale.
“Well, hostile, hostile… Nobody punched each other, right? I didn’t find it hostile,” said the four-time world champion. “Hostile is quite an extreme word. It was just very competitive and the fact that the two teams didn’t like each other at that moment is another story. But, hostile is something else.”
Nevertheless, there were countless political games between then Red Bull boss Christian Horner and his Mercedes compatriot Toto Wolff at the time. Said games somewhat continued when McLaren became Red Bull’s nearest rival, as there were some insinuations about flexible wings and tyre water - which McLaren CEO Zak Brown responded to with a special drinking bottle.
But since the summer, that polemic has essentially disappeared. It was clear to see during Friday’s press conference ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, where Brown and Laurent Mekies, who replaced Horner in July, appeared together.
The atmosphere was remarkably friendly - despite the weekend’s title decider. Another sign of the changed tone was the so-called “tape gate”, after which Mekies quickly stated that Red Bull would stop removing Lando Norris’ tape from the pitwall. And the shift seems partly down to Mekies, although he doesn’t want to take any credit for it.
“I don't know if you want to call it [that Red Bull was on] the edge [before] or not. I think we had a very strong fight, but we had a fair and clean fight. It's the way we want to go racing. We push everything to the limit, but we certainly respect the competition,” he said.
“When it comes to sporting fairness and respecting the competition, we think we can do both: being on the very limit and being respectful to the competition. Sport is a battle between giants, and we feel very strongly in that fight, and we respect our competitors.”
Does Red Bull also benefit from this approach?
According to Mekies, this approach isn’t just about dealing with rivals - it also benefits Red Bull internally. The underlying idea is to have less distraction and less noise than before.
“Let me put it this way: it's an incredibly competitive environment and we believe that to be competitive here you also need to enjoy what you are doing. We work hard, we play hard, that's the Red Bull spirit,” he said.
“All we have done is to make sure that we, as a group, can concentrate on pure racing and not getting too distracted by the noise around. And do what we fundamentally love to do, which is to try to get these cars to go faster on the track. So that's all really. Concentrate on what we love to do, push harder than anyone else and try to enjoy it in the process.”
This fits with his engineering background. Mekies wants to work systematically and only focus on things that make the car faster. Political games don’t necessarily fit into that, which is why it now seems to play a smaller role within Red Bull than before.
But this trend is not limited to Red Bull either.
With more and more engineers stepping into the role of team boss - think McLaren with Andrea Stella, Ayao Komnatsu at Haas and now Adrian Newey at Aston Martin - the public polemic seems to be increasingly fading. Wolff joked in Zandvoort that F1, for its entertainment, still needs “assholes” as team principals, but that verbal warfare was far less present in the second half of 2025 than it used to be.
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