Photo: Lukas Raich, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Red Bull has picked an interesting place to go shopping for its next Head of Racing: Aston Martin, the team it has spent two years quietly losing engineers to in the opposite direction. Tom McCullough — the long-serving engineer who built his career at Force India, Racing Point and Aston Martin — will join Red Bull at the start of 2027, the team confirmed ahead of this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix. On its own, that’s a minor personnel note. Stacked against everything else Red Bull has lost since 2024, it reads more like an admission that the gaps need filling from outside the building.
McCullough isn’t a design-office name. His two decades in the sport — starting at Williams in the early 2000s, a brief spell at Sauber, then a long run at Force India, Racing Point and finally Aston Martin — were built trackside, in race engineering and performance leadership roles that decide whether a car’s Saturday pace actually shows up on Sunday. That skill set stopped being useful to Aston Martin’s Formula 1 side at the start of 2025, when a leadership restructure moved him out of the grand prix team and into an internal role covering the manufacturer’s wider racing portfolio, quite possibly a nod to its growing Valkyrie hypercar program in the World Endurance Championship. Last month it emerged McCullough would leave Aston Martin altogether once his contract runs out at the end of this season.
Red Bull’s own statement was typically light on detail, welcoming McCullough for “the wealth of experience and expertise he will bring” without saying what exactly needs fixing. The timing does that job instead. Red Bull has also confirmed that Gianpiero Lambiase, Max Verstappen’s longtime race engineer, will leave when his contract expires in 2028 to become McLaren’s Chief Racing Officer. McCullough won’t replace Lambiase directly — a Head of Racing sits above individual race engineers, coordinating strategy and trackside performance across the team rather than running one driver’s side of the garage — but losing the person who talks Verstappen through every lap tends to sharpen the urgency around succession planning.
Lambiase is only the newest name on a list that has gotten uncomfortably long for a team that won three consecutive championships as recently as 2023. Adrian Newey, Red Bull’s chief technical figure for two decades, left to join Aston Martin. Jonathan Wheatley, its longtime sporting director, departed for Sauber’s incoming Audi project. Rob Marshall, one of Red Bull’s most senior engineering figures, is already at McLaren. Hiring McCullough doesn’t just replace one departure — it’s Red Bull trying to rebuild an entire senior leadership layer that used to be the envy of the paddock, largely from the outside in.
The job titles themselves are worth a second look. Neither “Head of Racing” nor “Chief Racing Officer” existed on most team org charts a decade ago, when a Team Principal and a Technical Director covered the top of the pyramid between them. Both roles formalize something that used to happen informally: one person accountable for turning raw pace into points, sitting across strategy, trackside engineering and driver management instead of owning a single department outright. In a budget-cap era where every team is forced to run leaner, that kind of centralized racing leadership has become nearly as valuable as the car itself, which is presumably why Aston Martin and McLaren keep circling people whose value shows up on a timing screen rather than in a wind-tunnel report.
Red Bull’s timing is also shaped by a 2026 season that has given its technical department little room to breathe. The team is already locked out of the FIA’s engine catch-up mechanism for the rest of the year, meaning any power-unit shortfall it’s carrying has to be solved with what’s already on the shelf. Losing senior engineering voices in the middle of that kind of regulatory bind is exactly when a team notices the difference between having a deep bench and having a thin one.
None of this changes anything about this weekend at Monza, where Red Bull is already managing a driver-side reshuffle of its own with Liam Lawson back in the car. But it’s worth remembering that McCullough doesn’t arrive until 2027 — Red Bull still has to get through the rest of this season and all of next year on its current staffing before the new hire has any influence on the building he’s walking into. What’s worth watching between now and then is whether more senior appointments follow, and whether Aston Martin, having already moved McCullough out of its F1 project once, treats his exit as closing a chapter or opening a new question about who runs its own trackside operation next.
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