- Hannah Schmitz emerges as next potential departure from Red Bull.
- Former chief mechanic warns the talent drain has become self-reinforcing.
- Ferrari is reportedly circling, and Milton Keynes is running out of answers.
Kenny Handkammer spent nearly a decade inside Red Bull Racing’s Milton Keynes base. He knows how the place breathes. So when he says something is wrong, it is worth listening.
The former Red Bull chief mechanic, speaking on the Two Mechanics podcast, raised the alarm over a potential new departure from the team.
According to Handkammer, Hannah Schmitz, the team’s Head of Race Strategy, may be the next senior figure to leave.
The warning arrived less than a week after Red Bull confirmed that race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will exit the team when his contract runs out in 2028.
A team in freefall
Red Bull dominated Formula 1 for years. Their empire was built on the shoulders of some of the most influential names in the sport. Now they are watching it quietly dismantle itself.
The list of senior figures who have already left is striking. Designer Adrian Newey and sporting director Jonathan Wheatley are gone.
Technical director Rob Marshall has departed. So have the team principal, Christian Horner, and the advisor, Helmut Marko. Each name, on its own, would have been a big story. Together, they tell a different one.
The Lambiase confirmation stung most recently. McLaren announced that he will join them as Chief Racing Officer, reporting to team principal Andrea Stella.
The timing was pointed. Lambiase is the only race engineer Max Verstappen has worked with since joining Red Bull in 2016. Verstappen has previously said he would walk away from the sport if Lambiase were no longer his engineer.
Now, before anyone has had the chance to process that, a new name has entered the conversation.
Handkammer sounds the alarm
Handkammer is not an outsider offering casual opinions. He started his Formula 1 career in 1989 as a mechanic at Benetton.
He moved to Renault in 2002, joined Red Bull in 2006, and rose to chief mechanic before leaving in 2014 for a senior position at Tesla Motors in California.
Handkammer saw the inner machinery of Red Bull up close. That makes his assessment harder to brush aside.
“The downfall of Red Bull is pretty tragic,” he said on the podcast. “If I were CEO, I’d be keeping a very close watch on this. These critical people are either already gone or on their way out.”
His concern is not just the number of departures. It is the quality of them. The people leaving are the ones who built championships, not mid-level support staff.
“It looks like Hannah Schmitz, Head of Strategy, is rumoured to go too,” he added. “All these massive key people, and there are talks, there’s going to be more. That’s a real head scratcher. How do you reconfigure the team?”
Handkammer also suggested that the exits are feeding on each other.
“It seems that Hannah Schmitz might be preparing to leave, and there are whispers that even more departures could follow,” he said. One confirmed exit, it appears, makes the next one feel inevitable.
Who is Hannah Schmitz?
To understand what Red Bull could be losing, it helps to understand who Schmitz actually is.
She grew up to become one of the sharpest strategic minds in top-level motorsport. Born in May 1985, she earned a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2009, with a focus on optimisation theory and statistical models.
She joined Red Bull that same year. Over 16 seasons, she worked across the operations room and the pit wall. She learned the team from every angle.
Schmitz contributed to six Constructors’ and eight Drivers’ Championship titles along the way.
Her rise through the ranks was steady and earned. She became Senior Strategy Engineer in 2011 and was promoted to Principal Strategy Engineer in 2021.
In 2026, she took over as Head of Race Strategy, succeeding Will Courtenay, who had left to join McLaren. Her own promotion, then, was born from a departure.
The fingerprints of her work are all over some of the team’s most memorable results.
She is credited with key contributions to Verstappen’s win at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix and his victories at the 2022 Hungarian and Dutch Grands Prix.
Schmitz also played a central role in Sergio Perez’s win at the 2022 Monaco Grand Prix and Verstappen’s triumph at the 2025 Qatar Grand Prix.
She is one of only 11 women ever to have stood on a Formula 1 podium.
Verstappen has spoken openly about his admiration for her. After the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix, he said, “She is incredibly calm. Simply put, she’s exceptional.”
Schmitz has since called that race one of her personal favourites.
Earlier this year, the sport recognised her publicly. Formula 1’s ‘In Her Corner’ initiative honoured Schmitz and Laura Muller, Esteban Ocon’s race engineer, by renaming Turn 6 at Melbourne’s Albert Park Circuit in their honour before the 2026 Australian Grand Prix.
Ferrari reportedly circling
The speculation around Schmitz reaches beyond Red Bull’s walls. Reports suggest Ferrari wants to bring her to Maranello.
If that is true, it completes a grim pattern. McLaren has already taken Courtenay and Lambiase from Red Bull. Newey went to Aston Martin. Wheatley landed at Audi (which he has since left).
Red Bull’s rivals are not simply watching the decline. They are accelerating it.
This is also not the first time Schmitz’s name has come up in this context.
In late 2024, then-team principal Christian Horner acknowledged publicly that rival teams would have approached her following Courtenay’s exit.
He framed it, at the time, as an opportunity for her to step up within Red Bull. She did step up. The question now is whether she stays.
At the time of writing this, neither Schmitz nor Red Bull Racing have commented on the rumours. She remains under contract. But in Milton Keynes right now, contracts have not been keeping people for long.
Handkammer’s question hangs in the air: how do you reconfigure the team? Red Bull Racing, for the moment, does not appear to have an answer.
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