Verstappen engineer to McLaren
Gianpiero Lambiase, the race engineer who’s been closely tied to Max Verstappen’s success, is leaving Red Bull to join McLaren as Chief Racing Officer with a move expected by 2028 — a hire that could reshape pit‑lane operations and team engineering culture. The news circulated widely on social posts and has been framed as a major personnel shift in the paddock. (x.com) (x.com)
Max Verstappen is not losing a mechanic or a strategist here. He is losing the voice in his ear on every qualifying lap, safety car restart, and pit wall argument, because Gianpiero Lambiase is leaving Red Bull for McLaren in 2028 as Chief Racing Officer. (formula1.com) (mclaren.com) A race engineer is the person who turns a driver’s feel into instructions the team can use in real time. Lambiase has been that link for Verstappen since 2016, the year Verstappen moved up from Toro Rosso to Red Bull and won on his Red Bull debut in Spain. (formula1.com) That partnership lasted through four straight World Drivers’ Championship titles from 2021 through 2024, and it became one of the most recognizable driver-engineer pairings in Formula One. Red Bull also promoted Lambiase to Head of Racing in 2024, which meant he was already doing more than talking Verstappen through laps. (formula1.com) (en.wikipedia.org) McLaren is not hiring him to sit on one radio channel. McLaren said its Chief Racing Officer role has “overall leadership of the race team,” and that those duties are currently handled by team principal Andrea Stella alongside his main job. (mclaren.com) That tells you what McLaren is buying: not just Verstappen’s trusted engineer, but one more senior operator to run race weekends, manage trackside decisions, and free Stella to work at a higher level. McLaren also said Lambiase will report directly to Stella when he arrives. (mclaren.com) (motorsport.com) The date matters almost as much as the move. Red Bull said Lambiase will leave when his current contract expires in 2028, which means he is expected to stay in his current Red Bull role through the end of the 2027 season unless the teams negotiate an earlier release. (formula1.com) (apnews.com) That long runway means the immediate 2026 championship fight does not change overnight. What changes now is the shape of the next cycle, because Formula One’s 2028 grid will sit two years into the new 2026 rules era and teams are already stacking up senior people for that reset. (apnews.com) (mclaren.com) For Red Bull, this is awkward because Lambiase was one of the few constants around Verstappen during a period of wider management churn. For McLaren, it is a raid on the team that defined the Verstappen era, using a senior hire to strengthen the pit wall rather than the driver market. (formula1.com) (mclaren.com) It also does not mean Verstappen is following him to Woking. Every official statement so far is about Lambiase’s contract and McLaren’s management structure, not about Verstappen’s future, and McLaren explicitly said Andrea Stella remains on a long-term deal as team principal. (mclaren.com) (motorsportweek.com) What this move really says is that McLaren thinks championships are won by org charts as much as by lap time. It has taken the man who helped translate Verstappen’s instincts into results and given him a job built to shape how the entire race team operates. (mclaren.com) (formula1.com)
