There are few race engineers in Formula 1 history with quite as much instant recognition as Gianpiero Lambiase, who is set for a shock switch away from Red Bull and Max Verstappen's stable to join rival McLaren when his contract expires next year.
The departure of any such senior figure would be a blow to any F1 team; but how badly will it rock a Red Bull team that has lost so much of its senior leadership team these past two years?
Perhaps more importantly, how will it affect Verstappen - who was understood to already have been seriously considering his future in F1?
Here's our team's reaction:
'New' Red Bull hasn't stopped the rot
Scott Mitchell-Malm
Lambiase is the latest in a very long line of departures over recent years since the passing of Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz in 2022.
Christian Horner was sacked last year, and Helmut Marko moved aside. Before that, design legend Adrian Newey had left, so too sporting director Jonathan Wheatley. Rob Marshall joined McLaren, where he is now chief designer, and Lambiase will reunite with Red Bull's former strategy chief Will Courtenay at McLaren too.
Other exits have followed in recent months: chief designer Craig Skinner and Verstappen's chief mechanic Matt Caller left over the winter, and long-serving front-end mechanic Ole Schack will leave too.
These are just a small number of people within an organisation that spans more than a thousand, and there will be others who have left that are not as high profile. But these are the people who set the direction, established the culture, made the key decisions, had a tonne of experience and were absolutely core to the team's rise and success.
They are material losses in terms of their expertise, experience, and place within the organisation, and they represent a serious blow to the new Red Bull era - led ostensibly by Laurent Mekies, but ultimately reporting to the Austrian corporate side of Red Bull under Oliver Mintzlaff.
Such a steady stream of departures shows that Red Bull's problems run much deeper than whatever issues existed under Horner's leadership - and there were issues. But the 'new' Red Bull has not been able to stop the rot off track.
It risks being something of a sinking ship, especially as on track the performance is extremely disappointing in early 2026, with question marks over the technical leadership and the direction the team has taken over the last couple of years.
We need to acknowledge - and respect - there is likely a significant personal factor in Lambiase's decision. So in isolation it could mean nothing more than a person doing what is best for them and their family.
However that does not change the move being part of a wider trend of Red Bull losing its most influential personnel.
Red Bull needs to get back on the front foot
Josh Suttill
Adrian Newey. Jonathan Wheatley. Now Gianpiero Lambiase. Max Verstappen soon? It feels like big names have only left Red Bull, rather than joined it, over the last two years.
And while there's plenty of great talent still there, I can't help but feel it needs to make go on an aggressive senior recruitment drive of its own.
After all, at its best, this is still a frontrunning F1 team, one that had the best car at stages last year.
It's done a perfectly solid job with its first-ever F1 power unit, too. Everyone expected that to be Red Bull's main 2026 deficit, but it's actually been the car.
So it still has a nice bit of pulling power. Why not use it and make sure you're attracting new pillars of the team, not just losing them?
Something akin to its big swoops for Adrian Newey and Peter Prodromou from McLaren and Rob Marshall from world champion Renault in the mid-2000s feels sorely needed now.
A troubling end of an era for Red Bull and Verstappen
Jon Noble
McLaren's success in singing Gianpiero Lambiase - both convincing him to leave Red Bull and beating rivals including Aston Martin to his signature - is a big coup.
But the loss is even greater for Red Bull, as it has an impact not only on the senior management operations at the team but it also has to influence any decision Max Verstappen makes on his future.
Lambiase has been a stalwart for both Red Bull and Verstappen, and someone so central to the success that they have all achieved together. Replacing someone of his calibre and experience will not be easy.
Losing him is the end of an era for Verstappen too; and will almost certainly serve to increase the four-time champion's viewpoint that now could be the time to take that sabbatical and think about where he goes with his life longer term.
From Red Bull's perspective, off the back of a challenging start to the year, the loss of Lambiase is a further sign of the one-way revolving door that has led to a host of senior staff exits - pointing to a cyclical change in a team that came so close to winning the world championship last year but now appears to be heading for more challenging times.
Red Bull's fight or flight moment
Jack Benyon
All empires fall, and this news definitely feels like another blow for the previously mighty Red Bull regime.
Helmut Marko, Matt Caller, Jonathan Wheatley, Ole Schack; the list of big Red Bull exits goes on.
Mercedes went through a similar haemorrhaging of staff as part of its era of turbo-hybrid rules success. It's natural that all teams go through it. Good people become very attractive to other teams.
You can choose to view this in a few ways. The pessimistic outlook says this is the end of Red Bull's F1 success for at least the near future, and that if most of the people involved in Verstappen's success have gone, that's one thing fewer keeping him there.
But you could also choose to view this in an optimistic way. Laurent Mekies is still new in the job and while less able to make sweeping changes than Christian Horner would have been, he's still tasked with building this new version of Red Bull. And he's shown a lot of promise he can manage this team effectively.
Replacing champions is sometimes impossible. But in F1, replacing champions is always inevitable. It's fight or flight time for Red Bull.
Verstappen sabbatical only feels more likely
Sam Smith
This news will undoubtedly feed into the yin and yang of Verstappen's upcoming career decision, and I tend to think it will push him even closer to potentially taking a sabbatical.
At 28, he's young enough to have one, especially when you consider that Alain Prost's in 1992 was taken when the also four-time world champion was 37!
I've seen in Formula E, a discipline Verstappen kind of passively aggressively spewed forth a few months ago, that the driver-engineer dynamic is absolutely crucial. The new skills of lift and coast and managing battery energy extract much more from an engaged driver and replicating that almost sixth-sense skill, while simultaneously racing wheel-to-wheel, should not be underestimated. There is a reason that Formula E drivers and engineers have very long lead times together and endure.
Verstappen is showing classic signs of not enjoying being an underdog in F1 now and this transitional phase for Red Bull will likely go on for a while. The question then is does the recapturing of the joy, something that has been eviscerated with the new regulations, occur before he has to make his next big career decision, whether it be in F1 or in another sphere?
If you roll in the fact Verstappen will have to develop a new relationship with a new engineer, something which will take time in terms of pure assimilation on many levels, then the evidence starts to point more starkly at a sabbatical period.
On Wednesday, Verstappen was at Paul Ricard checking out the GT World Challenge Europe paddock (where Lance Stroll is also racing this weekend).
It's clear that he is mulling over his next moves, while knowing that a future re-entry into F1 after a sabbatical, while not easy, would be his for the taking should he wish to go that route.
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