Red Bull’s chief F1 designer leaves team – two weeks before 2026 season

Craig Skinner, who has been with Red Bull for 20 years, has now moved on from the Milton Keynes outfit

Red Bull have suffered an early-season blow with the departure of chief F1 designer Craig Skinner from the team.

Skinner worked closely with Red Bull’s former design guru Adrian Newey, now team principal at Aston Martin, but the Milton Keynes outfit have now confirmed his exit after two decades.

While not directly linked to other departures, Skinner is the latest in a long line of key personnel to leave the team in recent years.

Christian Horner was relieved of his duties as F1 CEO last summer, a year after Newey announced his exit. Former sporting director Jonathan Wheatley and chief strategist Will Courtenay have also left for Audi and McLaren respectively.

Despite this, Max Verstappen claimed his fourth consecutive world championship in 2024 and was just two points away from winning last year’s drivers’ title. Red Bull have also showed impressive pre-season form, in their first year building their own engine alongside Ford.

Skinner joined Red Bull in 2006, around the same time as Newey, initially as a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) engineer before working his way up the ladder in various aerodynamic roles.

Craig Skinner has left Red Bull (Getty Images)

He became chief designer in 2022, after four years as chief of aerodynamics, and worked closely with Newey and technical director Pierre Wache on the ground-effect era of car in which Red Bull were a class above the field. In 2023, they won every race bar one.

Yet despite recent high-profile exits, this year’s RB22 car has shown early promise, with superior straight-line speed at last week’s test in Bahrain.

However, regardless of their promise, Max Verstappen was critical of this new generation of car, describing them as “anti-racing” and “like Formula E on steroids” given the focus on energy deployment.

The final pre-season test takes place this week (18-20 February) in Bahrain before the season-opening Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on 8 March.