There’s a moment backstage at Web Summit when a member of the production crew — easily twice the size of Laurent Mekies — wraps a beefy arm around the Oracle Red Bull Racing CEO’s shoulder and steers him toward the soundboard to retrieve his phone for a selfie. Most executives leading 2,000-person organizations would bristle at the informality, even from a superfan. Mekies instead smiles, his demeanor unchanged as he accommodates the starstruck crew member.
It’s a small moment but perhaps a revealing one about Mekies who, just four months ago, became only the second person to lead Red Bull Racing in its 20-year history.
“The first feeling is one of being privileged, being honored, to suddenly be part of such an incredible team,” Mekies later tells me onstage in French-accented English. “This team has been winning more than anyone else in Formula One in the last two decades. And then suddenly you are part of it.”
“Suddenly” is not an overstatement. As widely reported, the wholly unexpected call came in July. Christian Horner, the outspoken executive who had led Red Bull since its entry into F1 in 2005, was out. Mekies, who had been running the team’s sister outfit, Racing Bulls, for just over a year, was tapped to step up.
Mekies was an improbable choice in some ways. Where Horner delights in the media spotlight and gamesmanship that defines F1 team principals, Mekies spent much of his career in the engineering trenches. His approach to winning reflects that technical background, too; he sees performance gains not just in aerodynamics and tire compounds, but in eliminating friction from workflows and processes.
That philosophy extends to the team’s partnerships. Take 1Password, the cybersecurity company whose CEO, David Faugno, sits beside Mekies and me on the Web Summit stage. Faugno took over his own iconic brand four months ago — the same week as Mekies.
The partnership between a cybersecurity company and an F1 team might seem like an odd fit. Security, after all, usually means friction. Passwords to check, systems to authenticate, workflows that slow people down. In F1, where thousandths of a second matter, that’s unacceptable.
But that’s exactly why Mekies sees 1Password as integral to Red Bull’s competitive edge. “Our people have to manage and log in and log out of complex systems — aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics at the track, back at the factory, at the simulator, in the wind tunnel . . . We go today faster in this seamless login and logout of our people from one system to another than what we were doing without the security level.”
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
... continue reading