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McLaren has poached a veteran member of its Formula 1 title rival Red Bull's set-up to serve as its new sporting director.
Will Courtenay has been with Red Bull since it bought Jaguar's F1 entry in 2005 and has served as its head of race strategy since 2010.
But McLaren has announced he will join as the team's new sporting director, reporting to racing director Randeep Singh who in turn reports to team boss Andrea Stella.
It follows the arrival of senior technical figure Rob Marshall from Red Bull to McLaren earlier this year, who joined a technical structure that includes fellow ex-Red Bull engineer Peter Prodromou. Red Bull is also losing design guru Adrian Newey to Aston Martin for 2025 and its sporting director Jonathan Wheatley will leave to become team principal at Sauber next year.
Red Bull recently announced a new structure for its race team for when Wheatley exits at the end of the year, including a promotion for Max Verstappen's race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase.
Another bitter blow for Red Bull
Scott Mitchell-Malm
What's better than signing a very experienced, successful F1 leader who can bolster a key area in your team? Weakening your main rival in the process.
That's what McLaren does by bringing in Courtenay to bolster the F1 team leadership structure that Stella has been fettling quite constantly since taking charge at the end of 2022.
Courtenay will have been at the forefront of Red Bull becoming F1's benchmark in race strategy. A two-decade stint there means its razor-sharp operations have his fingerprints all over them.
His departure is a big blow - just another significant exit for a team that only recently announced a rejig of its sporting operations to cope with the loss of its own sporting director Wheatley.
Red Bull knows what a loss this is, especially as he is going to the team that has overtaken it on-track and in the constructors' championship, and is believed to be hurting as a result.
Given a few question marks over how McLaren has handled some races this year, Courtenay will almost certainly help sharpen F1's new pacesetter up further.
Reporting to Singh as sporting director will give Courtenay oversight of key trackside matters such as liaising with the FIA and free up Singh, who Stella rates highly, to be spread less thinly. As racing director, Singh has had oversight of the sporting side and strategy combined.
But it is not being presented as fixing a specific McLaren weakness, rather making its leadership structure more robust with added expertise and reducing stress points as others have been juggling multiple responsibilities.
Courtenay will also have a remit across McLaren's various racing exploits so there is intended to be a wider company benefit to his experience too.
It will take some time to feel that benefit. He is under contract until 2026 so this may need some serious negotiation for McLaren to get hold of its new recruit in the short-term.
McLaren will therefore need to find ways to improve in the meantime rather than depend on an arrival a year or two from now - but Stella's been drilling a mantra of 'improve today, don't wait until tomorrow' into this team for a while now already.
