Red Bull has found its man for the job nobody wanted to talk about out loud: replacing Gianpiero Lambiase. Tom McCullough, until recently a senior figure at Aston Martin, is heading to Milton Keynes to become the team’s new head of racing, and his arrival tells you rather a lot about how both teams are feeling right now.
McCullough will join in early 2027 once he has worked through a period of gardening leave from the Aston Martin group. It is a quiet, unglamorous appointment on paper, but don’t be fooled: this is Red Bull plugging one of the biggest gaps left by an exodus that has been rattling the team’s technical department for a while now.
Out with Lambiase, in with McCullough
Lambiase, who doubles as Max Verstappen‘s race engineer and has been the voice on the other end of his radio for years, is off to McLaren, with that move expected from 2028 at the latest. McCullough effectively steps into the operational side of that role as head of race engineering, taking charge of the trackside engineering effort during race weekends.
Red Bull’s statement kept things suitably corporate. “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,” the team said. Fine words, but the timing does the real talking: this is a team scrambling to replace institutional knowledge before it walks out the door entirely.
A career built in the midfield trenches
McCullough is no rookie hire. He has done time at Reynard Engineering, Williams and Sauber, and joined Force India, the team that eventually became Aston Martin, back in 2014 as chief race engineer. He rose to performance director by January 2018, a role that put him at the sharp end of the team’s better years.
But things soured. After a rough run through the second half of 2023 and into 2024, McCullough was shifted away from the F1 operation in January 2025 and moved sideways into the performance directorship of Aston Martin Performance Technologies, a corporate reshuffle dressed up as career progression. He was confirmed as leaving the Aston Martin group entirely in August 2026, as reported by RacingNews365, and has now resurfaced at Red Bull in a newly created role.
There’s something quietly brutal about that trajectory. A man who helped build Force India into a regular fourth-place finisher in the constructors’ championship gets bumped out of the cockpit-facing job just as his old team continues to struggle in the constructors’ championship.
Red Bull’s talent raid continues
McCullough isn’t the only high-profile arrival. He follows Gwen Lagrue, poached from Mercedes to take charge of Red Bull’s young driver programme, as the team’s second major outside signing in short order. Add in the departure of chief designer Craig Skinner, and Red Bull’s technical org chart has been through a proper shake-up: Ben Waterhouse now becomes chief performance and design engineer, while Andrea Landi arrives from Racing Bulls as head of performance.
Taken together, it looks less like a rebuild and more like a team papering over cracks with recognisable names. Red Bull sits fourth in the constructors’ standings on 186 points, some way adrift of McLaren‘s 263, and Verstappen‘s championship defence has long since stopped being realistic given the 130-point gap to the leader. Losing Lambiase, the man who has spent years in his ear on the radio, was never going to be a small thing, and finding a credible replacement matters more than any statement will admit.
Why this matters more than the press release suggests
Aston Martin, meanwhile, keeps shedding senior figures who once helped shape the team’s identity, even as it insists it is building something serious for the years ahead. Losing McCullough to a direct rival isn’t a killer blow on its own, but it’s another name off a list that is getting shorter, and another reminder that experienced engineers don’t sit around waiting for reshuffles to be resolved in their favour.
For Red Bull, McCullough arriving in 2027 gives Verstappen’s side of the garage a settled structure to build around before Lambiase actually walks out the door. Whether he can replicate what Lambiase brought to that pitwall is the only question that will actually matter once the season starts, and no press statement is going to answer that one for you.
