Top News

Red Bull have been told they cannot stop their staff exodus - but must do everything to stop Max Verstappen heading through the exit door. A huge number of staff have already left or handed in their notice over the last few years, and now star driver Verstappen is actively considering quitting Formula 1 - while the threat remains that he could just leave for a rival team with a quicker car.

Former Haas boss Guenther Steiner, also a former Red Bull employee, feels for team principal Laurent Mekies, who took over from Christian Horner last summer. "Laurent hasn't got an easy job at the moment," he told Express Sport, via the prediction market experts at Casino.org. "All the pressure is on him now because Max and the staff may be leaving. It's normal in a team which has had success for a long time, and then the success is gone.

"It all started with Adrian [Newey] leaving. People look around and say, 'if Adrian is leaving, maybe it's a good time to change as well'. They know their value is high when you come from a winning team, and if you wait too long, and the team is not winning anymore, your value then goes down.

"So a lot of these people just looked around and said maybe it's the right time to make a career move to get more money or get a bigger job - possibly a more senior position in the company. How do you stop it? I don't think at that point you can stop it. It's more about, 'How can I replace these people?'"

Since Horner's departure last July, many of Verstappen's allies have also decided to leave. His 'second father' Helmut Marko's contract expired in December, while several of his garage mechanics have quit for other teams. And the biggest blow of all came earlier this month with news of race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase's decision to join McLaren.

Steiner believes Red Bull will have to rely on a lot of internal talent stepping up to more senior positions to fill the gaps. He added: "Red Bull has got very good people in the second line. People who worked under the people who are leaving, and you need to find that talent to promote them. Which, again, for a company sometimes is good, because you give people the opportunity who have been there a long time and waiting for their chance.

"You need to take a step back before you take two forward, but it's not easy for Laurent, it's hard work to find the right talent, because everybody will now be trying to get these jobs. As well, you need to look around to see who is out there in the other teams which you could take from and put in your team, to help build the team up again.

"But it's very normal for a team. You've always got a period where everything goes right and then it just turns around and slowly you need to reinvent yourself. It's a circle. But for Laurent, I think the biggest challenge is to keep Max there. Because if he's leaving, that would not be good for the morale of the other people working there."