Ford boss says Red Bull have escaped an era of ‘controversy’ after Christian Horner’s exit

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Ford announced their partnership with Red Bull ahead of the 2023 F1 season, but as they prepare to debut their power unit, the team looks completely different.

The cars are no longer designed by the legendary Adrian Newey, who resigned in the spring of 2024. At the end of last season, Helmut Marko, one of the founding members of the project, left by mutual consent.

But the biggest change of all came in the team principal role, with Christian Horner sacked last July after 20 years in charge. Horner played a crucial role in the Ford negotiations but never got a chance to see the project through.

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He was replaced by Laurent Mekies, the former Racing Bulls boss. Mekies has made an impressive start in the role, overseeing Max Verstappen’s epic, if ultimately unsuccessful, title fightback in the second half of last season.

Jim Farley says Red Bull ‘in a totally different reality’ under Laurent Mekies

Ford CEO Jim Farley accepts that Red Bull were a ‘totally different’ team when they started negotiating.

Horner led the team to four consecutive titles with Verstappen between 2021 and 2024, repeating the run of dominance he had enjoyed with Sebastian Vettel at the start of the previous decade.

However, it was a period laden with ‘controversy’. Verstappen’s first title was overshadowed by an error from FIA race director Michael Masi at the title decider in Abu Dhabi, and the team were later found to have committed a minor breach of the F1 cost cap.

Red Bull arguably became the paddock villains under Horner, but Mekies is changing that image.

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“I thought Red Bull was the right flavour of the paddock, the part of the paddock that was different,” Farley told The Fast and the Curious podcast.

“What we like about this team is the unexpected part. The last four years, the opposite happened, they became big and successful and world champions, and [part of the] establishment.

“Yes, they had won a lot of races before, but there was controversy. Now we’ve emerged into another era of Red Bull, with Laurent, Max, the 2026 regs and McLaren re-emerging as a top team. We’re now in a totally different reality.

“The logic we used in why Red Bull was attractive changed. They changed and we changed as a company, and still it makes sense.”

Ford are in for a surprise when they discover what Max Verstappen is really like

In a separate interview with Sky Sports, Farley praised Verstappen for keeping a level head in 2025. He’s clearly confident that the Dutchman will remain calm if the new project is lagging behind at first.

Verstappen has relieved some of the pressure on Red Bull heading into the season by saying he intends to honour his contract.

“What I’d like to highlight about Max is that he never lost his cool,” said Farley. “When everything was challenging in the middle part of the season, he was focused on getting better.

“I give him so much credit as a champion. He really showed his true colours last year.”

Contrary to Farley’s comments, Verstappen is undeniably a driver who is prone to losing his temper, even if this was a more frequent occurrence at the start of his career.

Most notably, Verstappen received a 10-second penalty for colliding with George Russell at the Spanish GP last June, a red-mist moment he publicly regretted. As it turned out, it cost him crucial points in the title race.