Red Bull will add one of Formula 1’s most experienced trackside engineers to its senior structure when Tom McCullough becomes Head of Racing at the beginning of 2027, a move announced ahead of this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix. The official Formula 1 announcement confirms the destination, timing and role.
McCullough is leaving Aston Martin after a long association that also covered the team’s Force India and Racing Point eras. Aston Martin’s own organisational announcement says he had worked with the group for 11 years and would remain in a wider leadership position after moving away from the day-to-day F1 project. His 2027 switch now gives that experience a new home at Red Bull.
A return to the race team
McCullough’s career began at Williams in the early 2000s. He spent about a decade there before a spell at Sauber and then the move to Force India, where he developed through several engineering roles. That path matters because the new appointment is built on race-weekend experience rather than a purely corporate transfer. McCullough has worked close to the practical decisions that connect data, car behaviour, driver feedback and the pace available on track.
His most visible recent F1 position was performance director at Aston Martin. At the start of 2025, a senior leadership restructure moved him away from the Aston Martin F1 project into a part of the business focused on expanding its broader racing categories. The team’s announcement described that as a continuing leadership role, while the Formula 1 report confirmed that he would leave Aston Martin at the end of 2026.
Why the timing matters
Red Bull is making the appointment as its organisation continues to change around the new technical era. The team has already had to manage several senior departures, and Gianpiero Lambiase is scheduled to leave when his Red Bull contract expires in 2028 before joining McLaren as chief racing officer. McCullough’s arrival does not by itself define every reporting line, but it gives Red Bull a confirmed senior racing appointment for the period when its Ford power-unit project and 2026 car regulations are still shaping the team’s competitive direction.
That wider transition is already visible across the Red Bull group. Bettista’s report on Tsolov’s first Racing Bulls test showed the junior operation’s development pipeline, while our coverage of Honda’s first Aston Martin power-unit track run tracked the parallel changes at McCullough’s former team. The Head of Racing job sits above the detail of one test or upgrade, but those links show the scale of the environment in which senior engineering decisions now land.
A defined role for 2027
Red Bull has not published a long description of McCullough’s responsibilities beyond the Head of Racing title and the start date. That restraint is important. The appointment confirms who is joining and when, but it does not establish that he will take over every duty currently held by another employee or guarantee a particular performance outcome.
What is clear is that Red Bull has chosen an engineer with experience across multiple versions of the same Silverstone-based team, an understanding of modern performance operations and a long record inside Formula 1. McCullough will finish the 2026 season with Aston Martin before starting at Red Bull in January 2027. The next question is how the team turns that experience into a stable race operation while the sport’s technical reset continues.
