Ferrari wants Hannah Schmitz. McLaren already took Lambiase, Marshall, and Courtenay. Two rival teams are pulling Red Bull apart from completly different directions, and what’s left behind is starting to look like a team that won’t recover anytime soon.
We wrote last week about Gianpiero Lambiase leaving Red Bull for McLaren, and how McLaren might be using that signing to lure Max Verstappen. Those pieces covered one side of the story. What we didn’t expect was that within a week, the other side of the story would start unfolding too.
On Monday, former Red Bull mechanic Kenny Handkammer went on the Two Mechanics podcast and dropped a claim that got the paddock talking. He said that Hannah Schmitz, Red Bull’s newly promoted Head of Race Strategy, might be the next person to leave. And that Ferrari is the team circling.
“It seems that Hannah Schmitz might be preparing to leave, and there are whispers that even more departures could follow,” Handkammer said.
Let that sink in for a moment. McLaren is taking the people who built the car and ran the race operations. Now Ferrari wants the person who decided when to pit, what tyres to put on, and when to take the risks that won championships. Two different teams, two different raids, targeting two different pillars of what made Red Bull dominant.
This is not just an exodus anymore. This is a demolition.
Why Ferrari needs Schmitz more than anyone
Here is the part nobody is connecting yet. Ferrari doesn’t just want Schmitz because she’s available or because Red Bull is falling apart. They want her because their own strategy department has been a mess for years, and 2026 has already proven that nothing changed.
Go back to the Australian Grand Prix in March. George Russell’s Mercedes was batteling Charles Leclerc for the lead in the opening laps. On lap 11, Isack Hadjar’s Red Bull broke down and a Virtual Safety Car was called. Mercedes reacted instantly and pitted both cars. Ferrari stayed out with both drivers. Lewis Hamilton got on the radio and said what everyone was thinking. He wanted to know why at least one car didn’t come in.
Then a second VSC came when Valtteri Bottas retired. Ferrari still didn’t pit. The pit lane got closed because Bottas stopped near the entry, and by the time Ferrari finaly made their stops under racing conditions, Russell had a 16 second lead. Race over. Ferrari finished third and fourth with a car that had the speed to win.
Fred Vasseur said he had no regrets. Hamilton’s radio messages told a different story.
And this wasn’t a one time thing. During the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix, Ferrari showed what PlanetF1 described as “strategic paralysis.” Hamilton questioned calls on the radio, Leclerc was told to push when he was already pushing, and the team stumbled into a podium only because a safety car bailed them out. Ferrari has raw speed. What they don’t have is someone on the pit wall who can convert that speed into wins when the race gets complicated.
Schmitz is exactly that person. She’s the one who called the safety car pit for Verstappen at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix, dropping him behind Hamilton temporarily before coming back to win. She engineered the tyre strategy that took Max from P10 to victory at the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix, a race where Verstappen himself called her “insanely calm” and “exceptional.” She made the bold call at the 2025 Qatar Grand Prix that earned her a spot on the podium.
Ferrari doesn’t need another engineer or another designer. They need someone who can make the right call in 30 seconds when the race changes. Schmitz has been doing that better than anyone in Formula 1 for a decade.
The irony that nobody is mentioning
Here’s the thing that should bother Red Bull fans the most. Schmitz only got promoted to Head of Race Strategy in 2026. She waited an entire extra year because Will Courtenay couldn’t negotiate an early release from his contract before leaving for McLaren. The promotion was supposed to keep her happy. Keep her loyal. Stop exactly what is happening now.
Back in 2024, Christian Horner even said it publicy. He told Autosport that Courtenay’s departure opens a door for Schmitz, and without that opportunity “she’d have been a prime target for somebody.”
Well, she got the opportunity. She got the title. And she might still be a prime target anyway.
The promotion didn’t fix anything because the problem was never about job titles. The problem is that Red Bull is a fundamentaly different team now compared to two years ago. Adrian Newey is gone. Horner himself got fired. Helmut Marko’s influence evaporated. Jonathan Wheatley left. Rob Marshall left. Will Courtenay left. Lambiase is leaving. Ole Schack, Verstappen’s front end mechanic for over twenty years, walked out recently and reportedly told people the team atmosphere changed after Oliver Mintzlaff took over the corporate side.
A promotion means nothing when the building around you is emptying out.
What this means for Verstappen
We’ve already covered the Lambiase situation in detail. Max losing his race engineer is massive. But if he also loses Schmitz? That changes the conversation completly.
Think about what Verstappen actually has on the pit wall right now. Lambiase is the voice in his ear during every session. Schmitz is the brain behind every strategic decision during the race. These are the two people he trusts most in the entire operation. He’s praised both of them publicly, multiple times.
Lambiase is confirmed leaving. If Schmitz goes to Ferrari, Verstappen loses both of them within a relatively short window. At that point, what exactly is Red Bull offering him? A car that is almost a full second off the pace in qualifying? A team that sits sixth in the constructors with 16 points after three races? A rookie teammate in Hadjar who is already outqualifying him some weekends?
Let’s look at the numbers. After three races, Kimi Antonelli leads the championship with 72 points. George Russell has 63. Max Verstappen is ninth. The RB22 has been described by Motorsport.com as 0.97 seconds off the pace in qualifying and 1.26 seconds per lap behind Mercedes in race trim. That makes it the slowest Red Bull car since 2015. At Suzuka, Verstappen couldn’t get past Pierre Gasly’s Alpine for the entire race. An Alpine.
There are reports, denied officialy but widely believed, that Verstappen’s contract includes a performance clause. If he is not in the top two of the championship standings by the summer break, he can walk. He is currently around 60 points behind second place. The clause is not just realisticly triggerable at this point. It is almost certainly going to be triggered unless something dramatic changes.
The two front war
Step back and look at the full picture for a second.
McLaren has taken Rob Marshall (chief designer, joined 2024), Will Courtenay (sporting director, joined January 2026), and Gianpiero Lambiase (chief racing officer, confirmed for 2028). These are the people who built the car, ran the race weekends, and communicated directly with the lead driver. That’s the engineering and operational side.
If Ferrari gets Schmitz, they take the strategic side. The person who decides the race plan. The person who adapts when things go wrong. The person Verstappen relies on to make the calls that turn bad positions into wins.
McLaren raids the engineering brain. Ferrari raids the strategy brain. What is left?
Laurent Mekies, who ironicaly came from Ferrari himself, is running the team. Isack Hadjar is learning the sport. And Max Verstappen, if he’s even still there, is driving a car that he has called “undriveable” and “completly anti-driving.”
Red Bull spent 15 years building the most complete team in Formula 1. The smartest strategist, the most experienced engineers, the best race engineer, the greatest designer. All of that infrastructure, all of those relationships, all of that knowledge. It’s being distributed across the grid now like parts from a car being stripped in a junkyard.
Is 2026 the beginning of the end?
We keep hearing that Red Bull just needs time. That the car can be fixed. That the team will regroup. And maybe that’s true. Maybe Mekies pulls something together. Maybe the break before Miami helps them find some pace.
But here’s the uncomfortable question. When was the last time a team lost this many important people in this short of a period and came back quickly? Motorsport.com already drew the comparisson to the start of the hybrid era in 2014, when Red Bull fell off the pace after dominating with Sebastian Vettel. It took them seven years to fight for championships again. Seven.
GPFans published a predicted 2027 grid a few days ago. Their guess for Red Bull? Oscar Piastri and Isack Hadjar. Not Verstappen. They basicaly treated it as a development team. That’s where the smart money is going now.
We wrote two weeks ago that McLaren was playing the long game by signing Lambiase. We theorized that they were building a trap for Verstappen, putting all the familiar faces in place so that when Max decides to leave Red Bull, Woking feels like home.
The Schmitz to Ferrari rumor adds another layer. Because if Ferrari gets Schmitz, it means both of Red Bull’s biggest rivals have pieces of the old Red Bull machine inside their own operations. McLaren has the builders. Ferrari could have the strategist. And Red Bull has… a car that finishes behind Alpines and Haas, a driver who talks about retirement every press conference, and a corporate structure that people are leaving as fast as they can.
We said in our first article that “the team that dominated 2022 and 2023 barely resembles itself anymore.” That was before the Schmitz rumor. If she leaves, it won’t just barely resemble itself. It will be a completly different organisation wearing the same logo.
And at that point, the question is no longer whether this is Red Bull’s worst season ever. The question is wether they can even stop the bleeding before it becomes permanent.
