McLaren CEO Zak Brown expects new recruit Gianpiero Lambiase to “play a great role” and anticipates that he will be with the Woking Formula 1 team “for a long time”.

Max Verstappen’s race engineer has been hired as McLaren’s future head of racing, with the team noting that he will start no later than 2028, when his Red Bull contract ends.

Brown stressed that the 45-year-old will take over some of the workload currently shouldered by team boss Andrea Stella.

“Very excited to have GP join us,” he said. “I think my job as CEO is to make sure that we have stability and visibility to the future. I think we’ve got a lot of talented individuals that have room for growth.

“On the racing operations side, Andrea, in reality, kind of has three jobs. I think we sometimes talk about he has two. He actually has three. He’s the team principal, he runs the racing team, and he also plays a big role in kind of a technical director capacity.

“Andrea is kind of the glue that brings that together. Now you’re seeing most teams with the CEO and team principal, now you’re seeing the team principal role evolve.

"And these teams are so big that if you’re going to be great in all those roles – I think Andrea is very capable of doing two jobs – but asking them to do three jobs is a tall order.

“So I think GP will come in and play a great role there, and then my job is always to be looking down the road, as to who can play and grow within the sport. And so certainly, given GP’s experience and his age, is someone I think that can be here for a long time at McLaren and grow.”

Brown downplayed the suggestion that Lambiase’s departure was another sign of a downturn at Red Bull, with the likes of Christian Horner, Adrian Newey, Rob Marshall and Jonathan Wheatley all having left over the last couple of years.

“I think it would be very foolish to write Red Bull off,” said Brown. “I also think Audi has done a very good job. So I think it would be foolish to not think the other teams are going to move up the grid quickly.

“I think things are only going to consolidate over time, not widen, and we see how quickly the sport can change, and how people quickly can get competitive and then sometimes not.

“I think they have to kind of do a little bit of a reset. They lost a lot of people. Christian, Wheatley, GP eventually, Newey, Dan Fallows.

“The majority of their pit wall has changed. I rate Laurent [Mekies], I think he does a very good job. He's technical, he’s young, and I think he’s got to rebuild the people that he lost and rebuild the team, and I have no doubt he will.

“And much like McLaren, we had an immense amount of talent that just needed to be unlocked, I think that’s probably the same as Red Bull. They’ve been very dominant up to not very long ago. So there’s a lot of talent in there, and I think he’ll just need to get it redirected.”