Red Bull GmbH has confirmed Helmut Marko will leave the team at the end of the F1 2025 season, ending a tenure of over 20 years.<\/p>\n
After over two decades involved in the operations of Red Bull\u2019s F1 teams, the parent company has confirmed Helmut Marko will leave at the end of 2025.<\/p>\n
Helmut Marko: Now is the right moment to go<\/p>\n
With speculation swirling since the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend about Marko\u2019s future, Red Bull GmbH, the parent company of the Red Bull Racing team, has released a short statement confirming the Austrian\u2019s departure from the organisation.<\/p>\n
With more than 20 years of tenure working with Red Bull<\/a>, the statement says that Marko has made a personal decision to step away from his role, where he has served in an official capacity as a senior advisor to the F1 operations on behalf of Red Bull GmbH.<\/p>\n \u201cI have been involved in motorsport for six decades now, and the past 20-plus years at Red Bull have been an extraordinary and extremely successful journey,\u201d Marko said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has been a wonderful time that I have been able to help shape and share with so many talented people. Everything we have built and achieved together fills me with pride.<\/p>\n \u201cNarrowly missing out on the world championship this season has moved me deeply and made it clear to me that now is the right moment for me personally to end this very long, intense, and successful chapter.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish the entire team continued success and am convinced that they will be fighting for both world championship titles again next year.\u201c<\/p>\n Speaking to the media, including PlanetF1.com, after the disappointment of Max Verstappen\u2019s title defeat to Lando Norris in Abu Dhabi, Marko had explained that he would need to \u201csleep on it\u201d when considering what his future with Red Bull might look like.<\/p>\n Marko still had one year left on his contract with the company, while he also served as a director of the Red Bull Racing team.<\/p>\n However, it\u2019s understood that tensions between Marko and the new power structure of GmbH CEO Oliver Mintzlaff and newly-appointed F1 team principal Laurent Mekies had escalated during the second half of this season due to various factors.<\/p>\n The 82-year-old has been the last remaining piece of the former long-standing power structure at Red Bull Racing, with the Austrian serving as the \u2018man on the ground\u2019 for the company\u2019s late founder, Dietrich Mateschitz, when Red Bull first entered Formula 1 in 2005.<\/p>\n Marko, together with former team boss Christian Horner, formed a formidable partnership, with the team becoming one of the most competitive of the past two decades as the Milton Keynes-based squad emerged first as championship contenders in 2009 and, shortly after, multiple title winners.<\/p>\n But, in the wake of Mateschitz\u2019s death in 2022 and the transfer of shares to his son Mark, who appointed Mintzlaff to the role of CEO as one of a three-man board at Red Bull, a power struggle began to emerge within the F1 team under Horner\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n This eventually ended in the bombshell axing of Horner from his roles as team boss and CEO of Red Bull Racing during the summer of 2025, as well as his being removed as a director of the various companies under Red Bull\u2019s F1 umbrella. He was succeeded in all of these roles by Mekies, with Mintzlaff turning to the French engineer after Mekies held down the team boss role at Racing Bulls from the start of 2024.<\/p>\n With Marko having seemingly come through the transitional period unscathed, it appears that tensions between the Austrian and the new power structure of Mintzlaff and Mekies have escalated through various incidents.<\/p>\n As a representative of Red Bull GmbH and not Red Bull Racing, Marko has become infamous for speaking to the media as he pleases, often without any oversight from the team, and his revealing of more sensitive information on a regular basis is believed to have been a growing strike against him.<\/p>\n This was behaviour largely tolerated while working with Horner, who was willing to give Marko greater freedom in this regard.<\/p>\n As reported by PlanetF1.com on Monday, former McLaren junior Alex Dunne reached an advanced stage of negotiations with Marko<\/a>, with a deal signed to bring the 20-year-old Irishman into the fold of the Red Bull programme. This was done entirely by Marko, acting alone, with no input from Mekies and Mintzlaff.<\/p>\n Upon the discovery of the contract with Dunne, Marko\u2019s unilateral decision-making is said to have been a further strike against him, particularly in the eyes of Mintzlaff, who has set out to bring control of Red Bull\u2019s F1 operations entirely back under the GmbH umbrella and his leadership.<\/p>\n The ordered termination of the deal is said to have triggered a penalty clause in the contract, meaning Dunne is set to receive a termination fee said to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the sum is this large, Red Bull\u2019s payment is likely to be going some way towards Dunne\u2019s F2 campaign with Rodin in 2026, as well as compensating for the exit payment shelled out to McLaren to leave the Woking-based team\u2019s development programme.<\/p>\n The ice under Marko is said to have melted further at the Singapore Grand Prix, with the head of the Thai shareholding in Red Bull, Chalerm Yoovidhya, understood to have become upset with aspects of Marko\u2019s behaviour in the paddock.<\/p>\n The final straw is linked to Marko\u2019s comments made after the Qatar Grand Prix, in which he insinuated on live television that 18-year-old Kimi Antonelli had intentionally let title hopeful Lando Norris through to take a position from him on the penultimate lap of the race.<\/p>\n Antonelli had already started to receive significant social media abuse in the immediate aftermath, with this toxicity further fuelled by Marko\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n The incident is said to have incensed Mekies to the point where he\u2019s believed to have been personally involved in the apology statement issued by the team afterwards.<\/p>\n But, according to the statement issued by GmbH on Tuesday, the decision to step back and away from F1 was one Marko came to of his own accord.<\/p>\n More on F1 2025<\/p>\n \ud83d\udc49\u00a0The results of the F1 2025 championship <\/a><\/p>\n