Lambiase to join McLaren
GianPiero Lambiase — Max Verstappen’s engineer and Red Bull’s Head of Racing — confirmed he will leave Red Bull in 2028 to become McLaren’s Chief Racing Officer working under Andrea Stella. That’s a major personnel shift in F1 engineering leadership with long‑term implications for both teams. (x.com)
McLaren just hired the voice most Formula 1 fans know from Max Verstappen’s radio. GianPiero Lambiase will stay at Red Bull through the end of 2027, then move in 2028 to McLaren as Chief Racing Officer under team principal Andrea Stella. (formula1.com) That sounds like a pit wall job, but it is bigger than that. Red Bull says Lambiase is its Head of Racing, a role covering trackside activities, and McLaren is giving him a senior operations post above the usual race engineer brief. (redbullracing.com, formula1.com) A race engineer is the person who turns a driver’s lap-by-lap chaos into usable decisions. He is the one in the driver’s ear on tyre life, brake temperatures, overtakes, safety cars, and when to pit, which is why Lambiase became one of the most recognizable voices in the sport. (redbullracing.com, formula1.com) Lambiase has been Verstappen’s race engineer since Verstappen joined Red Bull in 2016. Formula 1 says that partnership ran through four world championships and made Lambiase one of the central figures in Red Bull’s modern era. (formula1.com, formula1.com) Red Bull had already expanded his power before this move. In 2024 the team promoted him to Head of Racing after Jonathan Wheatley left for Sauber and Audi, putting Lambiase in charge of all trackside activities while he kept engineering Verstappen. (formula1.com, redbullracing.com) McLaren is not hiring him to talk one driver through qualifying laps. Formula 1’s reporting says Andrea Stella wants Lambiase to strengthen an already deep senior group, which fits Stella’s habit of building McLaren through specialist operators rather than one-star management. (formula1.com, mclaren.com) Stella’s own career explains the fit. McLaren says he became team principal in December 2022 after years as Head of Race Operations, Performance Director, and Executive Director, Racing, so he knows exactly how much races are won by process and communication rather than just car design. (mclaren.com, mclaren.com) The timing matters too. Because Lambiase is not leaving until 2028, Red Bull gets two more full seasons with Verstappen’s long-time engineer, and McLaren gets time to plan a handover instead of forcing an immediate reshuffle. (formula1.com) It also means the next question is not “Will Verstappen follow him now?” but “Who replaces him on Red Bull’s pit wall in 2028?” Sky Sports and Formula 1 both frame the move as a major shift because the engineer-driver link at the front of the grid is usually built over years, not swapped out like a spare front wing. (skysports.com, formula1.com) So this is less a transfer-window stunt than a long fuse on a leadership change. Red Bull loses the man who helped run its race weekends from the headset and the pit wall, and McLaren adds one of the few engineers in Formula 1 with recent title-winning authority over both. (redbullracing.com, formula1.com)
