Why hasn’t Laurent Mekies been made a director at Red Bull?

While Laurent Mekies has succeeded Christian Horner as Red Bull’s CEO and team principal, he has not been made a director at any of its various companies.

Last week, PlanetF1.com revealed paperwork changes lodged with the UK’s Companies House confirmed plenty of changes across the various Red Bull companies following the ousting of Christian Horner from his roles.

What changes have been made at Red Bull?

Horner was removed from his operational duties at Red Bull Racing at the start of July. The British executive was stood down from his roles as CEO and team principal of the Milton Keynes-based squad and was pushed back into being ‘just’ an employee with no operational duties.

Since then, Horner has gone on holiday with his family, with photographers in Croatia spotting him and his wife Geri Horner on board the £10.5 million yacht Majic last weekend.

Just days before, documents lodged with the UK’s Companies House, the legal registry for company structures and personnel in the United Kingdom, revealed a raft of changes had been made to the directorship structures at the five Red Bull companies that call Milton Keynes home.

First reported by PlanetF1.com, Horner had been listed as a director at all five, including Red Bull Racing and Red Bull Technology Ltd. (the F1 team’s holding company under GmbH), but was replaced in this position by GmbH’s head of HR, Stefan Salzer.

Helmut Marko, Horner’s fellow director at the four companies under the holding company, remains in place, but does not have a directorship role at the holding company itself.

Following the removal of Horner as a director, here are the updated company structures:

• Red Bull Technology Ltd. (Holding company): Stefan Salzer and Alistair Rew.
• Red Bull Racing: Helmut Marko and Stefan Salzer.
• Red Bull Powertrains: Helmut Marko and Alistair Rew.
• Red Bull Advanced Technologies: Helmut Marko and Alistair Rew.
• Red Bull Advanced Services: Helmut Marko and Alistair Red.

The raft of changes, however, doesn’t include Horner’s sporting successor, Laurent Mekies, with the French engineer conspicuously not yet being given the same level of responsibility within the organisation as the man he has succeeded.

Why might Red Bull have decided against Laurent Mekies as a director?

In the UK, a company director is responsible for steering the ship, making big decisions, ensuring conformity with legal requirements, and, put simply, guiding the business towards success.

Executive directors play hands-on roles in daily operations and balance the responsibilities of being a director with operational duties, with such directors involved in strategic decisions and the management of the day-to-day.

Non-executive directors are usually less involved in the day-to-day, contributing to a company by way of expertise and independent judgement to guide in the areas of company strategy and governance, usually being seen as ‘advisory’ and not direct employees due to not being assigned operational duties.

While Companies House doesn’t confirm the nature of their directorships, a safe assumption would be that Horner operated in an executive director role, with Marko, known for being a team advisor appointed by GmbH, would conform with the definition of a non-executive directorship.

With no indication that Marko’s role has changed, Salzer’s appointment from GmbH suggests he is also taking a non-executive function and won’t involve himself in day-to-day operations.

However, this begs the question of why Mekies hasn’t been given a directorship role at Red Bull Racing, or any of the other companies where Horner held such a role, given that Marko and Salzer’s meeting of the definitions for a non-executive director suggests that a more hands-on executive director isn’t yet in place.

Curiously, the French engineer is still listed as one of four directors, another of whom is CEO Peter Bayer, for the UK branch of Racing Bulls, which is headquartered in Faenza in Italy.

While, on paper, this would suggest that Mekies is still involved in the day-to-day management of Racing Bulls while being the CEO and team boss of a rival F1 operation, this is more likely to be as a result of an administrative oversight or paperwork delay rather than being the actual state of affairs.

But the recent lodging of paperwork pertaining to the Red Bull F1 operations suggests a deliberate decision has been made not to make Mekies a director – at least, for now.

It’s worth pointing out that Horner, who started as team boss at Red Bull Racing when the team first entered F1 in 2005, was not immediately made a director. For the first two seasons, it was Marko and Dany Bahar, chief operating officer of Red Bull GmbH as a direct employee under Dietrich Mateschitz, who were the Red Bull Racing directors.

Horner was only made a director in 2007, coinciding with the confirmation of Bahar moving on from Red Bull GmbH to take up a new role with Ferrari.

With Salzer’s appointment last week, Red Bull has thus essentially reverted to the operational structure it employed when it first arrived in Formula 1: a non-executive director appointed from GmbH in Salzer, and a non-executive director in Marko, who straddles the line between the parent company and the racing operation, and a team boss who, in blunt terms, is ‘merely’ an employee putting into action the desires of the board.

It took two and a half years as team principal for Horner to become immersed enough within Red Bull to become a director of the F1 team, before being appointed to the board of the Technology holding company three years later. His remaining three Red Bull appointments were all made in the last five years as Powertrains, Advanced Technologies, and Advanced Services were created as separate companies.

Though one interpretation of Mekies not being made a director could be that he isn’t seen as a long-term solution to lead Red Bull’s operations forward, it could easily be that, like Horner, he needs to put in a few years of hard yards to earn this responsibility.

Another possibility is that Mekies could be a de facto director, simply lacking an official appointment while still functioning as a director. The recency of the changes, as Red Bull attempts a hard reset of its F1 team and operations post-Horner, could lead to this situation, meaning Mekies’ name could crop up on Companies House at any time to confirm a formal appointment.

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Sources indicated to PlanetF1.com recently that the decision to remove Horner is largely to recapture some of the ethos that the team had when it first arrived in F1, with the focus being “on the can, not the man”.

The desire to move away from a team being focused around and led by one figure of prominence could also explain a desire to put in place a directorship structure of a non-executive nature, although this does mean that Mekies, as CEO, does stand out amongst his peers as being the only one from the UK-based teams not to have been appointed as a director.

Looking through the seven UK-based F1 teams, McLaren CEO Zak Brown is a director at McLaren Racing, but team boss Andrea Stella is not. Toto Wolff, as a part-owner of Mercedes as well as being CEO and team boss, is a director.

Alpine CEO Philippe Krief is a director at the Alpine F1 team, while the incoming Steve Nielsen – whose job title will be managing director – is extremely likely to be appointed as a director.

At Williams, James Vowles is team boss but is not on the board of directors, while at Aston Martin, CEO Andy Cowell is listed as a director of one of the Group’s subsidiary companies, AMR Performance Group, but not of the F1 team or the holding company itself. A clear picture is difficult to determine for the Silverstone-based squad, which is comprised of a myriad companies that form a complicated structure (of around 12 companies) underpinning Aston Martin.

Neither Ayao Komatsu nor his predecessor as Haas team boss, Guenther Steiner, has been appointed as a director at Gene Haas’ eponymous team, but equally neither has been appointed as CEO during their tenures.

With Red Bull opting to stick with its F1 team boss also being the CEO, the pattern across the teams means there’s nothing particularly unusual about its team boss not being made a director – but it is unusual for a CEO.

Salaries, which do play an important role due to F1’s financial regulations and the budget cap, won’t be a factor here. While the regulations allow the top three employees of a reporting group to be outside of the budget cap, a director does not necessarily command a higher salary.

With Horner’s employment status at Red Bull uncertain, given that termination as a director does not necessarily mean termination as an employee, it’s entirely possible his salary, even now, continues to count towards this excluded trio, with Mekies’ salary perhaps not being bumped up to suit his new responsibilities until after Horner has fully exited the organisation.

It’s important to note that, given a director’s role doesn’t equate automatically to a higher salary, Mekies not being made a director is also unlikely to have anything to do with having to wait for a complete Horner exit.

PlanetF1.com has approached Red Bull GmbH to enquire about the directorship changes lodged with the UK’s Companies House.

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