Red Bull signs Tom McCullough as Lambiase’s replacement

Red Bull has confirmed its new head of racing: Tom McCullough, a long-serving Aston Martin engineer, will take on the role from the start of the 2027 Formula 1 season. Aston Martin’s veteran engineer McCullough will join the Red Bull Formula 1 team next season as the team looks to replace McLaren-bound Gianpiero Lambiase as head of racing. It is a significant appointment. It is also a very deliberate one.

Why this appointment matters more than it looks

McCullough’s signing comes as Red Bull counters a prior managerial exodus, with Adrian Newey, Jonathan Wheatley, Rob Marshall and strategy chief Will Courtenay among those who have moved on in recent years, in addition to Lambiase’s McLaren move and the expected switch of chief engineer Paul Monaghan to Cadillac. That list is longer than most casual observers realise. Red Bull have not just lost personnel. They have lost architecture, the kind of institutional knowledge that takes years to rebuild and cannot be imported via a single signing.

Red Bull has simultaneously reshaped its technical structure, with Ben Waterhouse taking on the role of chief performance and design engineer and Andrea Landi moving across from Racing Bulls as head of performance. McCullough slots into the operational side of that same rebuild. The new role effectively runs all aspects of the race team under team principal Laurent Mekies.

Red Bull said in a statement: “We’re delighted to welcome Tom to the team at the beginning of 2027 and look forward to the wealth of experience and expertise he will bring to the role.”

McCullough’s Aston Martin exit explained

McCullough was a long-time servant of Aston Martin through its Force India and Racing Point days, performing the chief race engineer role for four seasons before becoming its performance director, a job which he held until the end of the 2024 season. That is over a decade of accumulated track knowledge at a single organisation, across three different names on the nose cone.

He became performance director in 2018 and held the position until the end of 2024, before a restructure ahead of the 2025 season saw his F1 responsibilities transferred to former team principal Mike Krack. McCullough subsequently moved into a senior role with Aston Martin Performance Technologies, stepping away from the F1 operation before his departure from the wider Aston Martin group was confirmed in August.

His position inside Aston Martin had become untenable after that reshuffle. Which makes him available. Red Bull did not hesitate. For a deeper look at how Adrian Newey’s own Aston Martin connection works structurally, the ownership dynamics there are worth understanding too.

How Red Bull is rebuilding its sporting leadership

This is the part the headlines miss. This is not simply a story about one engineer swapping seats. It reflects a broader reset at Milton Keynes, one that has been underway since 2024. McCullough’s signing also follows Red Bull’s recruitment of former Mercedes junior programme chief Gwen Lagrue as its young driver advisor. The team is being rebuilt, layer by layer, while still competing at the front of the grid with Isack Hadjar and Max Verstappen.

McCullough joined Williams in 2002 as a data engineer and became a race engineer there, working with Rubens Barrichello, Nico Hülkenberg and Bruno Senna. After a short spell as Sauber’s head of track engineering in 2013 he moved to Force India, and stayed with that squad through its Racing Point and Aston Martin identities. The breadth of that experience, across multiple teams and regulatory eras, is precisely what Red Bull needs right now. A single-team lifer would not have cut it.

Who engineers Verstappen now?

Lambiase is currently serving a dual role at the team as Max Verstappen’s race engineer, dovetailing those duties with a more overarching “head of racing” position. McCullough steps into the latter. The race engineering job is a separate question, and Red Bull has not answered it. Lambiase is contracted at Red Bull until 2028 and the team says he stays until then, so for now he keeps engineering Verstappen. Who takes over after that has not been announced. Verstappen’s former performance engineer Tom Hart is the name most often mentioned, and he is reported to have turned down a move to Williams, but nothing is confirmed. That provides some continuity for Verstappen at a time when the team around him is changing at pace. Whether that stability holds beyond 2027 is a genuinely open question, given Verstappen’s contract runs until 2028 but sources have indicated he has clauses in his deal that could help him exit before then.

What this means for McLaren’s long game

Lambiase will take on the existing role of Chief Racing Officer at McLaren, reporting to team principal Andrea Stella once his Red Bull contract expires in 2028. The role already exists within the team’s structure, with overall leadership of the race team, duties currently managed by Stella in addition to his role as Team Principal.

The move reinforces McLaren’s aggressive recruitment drive, following the high-profile additions of Rob Marshall and Will Courtenay from Red Bull in recent times. Lando Norris is driving for a team that is being deliberately constructed to dominate not just now but through the next regulatory cycle. Every signing from Red Bull tightens that project.

The appointment is confirmed, the structure is shifting, and 2027 will look very different on both sides of the garage. Follow the full picture as it develops on our Red Bull driver pages and across our motorsport business coverage.