Political tug-of-war between Ferrari, Red Bull Racing and AlphaTauri. Laurent Mekies, currently sporting director of the Scuderia, is the intended successor to Franz Tost at Red Bull’s sister team. The Frenchman has even been announced by AlphaTauri, but the switch from Mekies suddenly doesn’t seem so certain anymore.
The Italian branch of Motorsport.com reports this on Saturday morning. Mekies still has an ongoing contract at Maranello and so negotiations have to be done on how he can make the switch to Red Bull. Ferrari president John Elkann would like to take over some engineers from the Milton Keynes team in return, but team boss Christian Horner is not in favor of this deal.
While Horner stood his ground, Elkann therefore took a different tack during a conversation with the Red Bull boss on Friday. If Ferrari doesn’t get Red Bull’s intended engineers, AlphaTauri won’t get Mekies. The negotiations are stuck in that regard, because Red Bull wants to start with the composition of the AlphaTauri team for 2024 and Ferrari wants to start preparing for next year just as well.
Mikey isn’t worried
Mekies is therefore a valuable pawn in a political chess game between three Formula 1 teams. He himself is not too concerned about the situation. “As long as I wear the red uniform, I will be 100 percent committed to Ferrari. Believe me, when we come out on track with a certain shirt, we only think about that team and that race weekend. And so we agreed to continue.’
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