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Karting world champion and Red Bull Formula 1 team-mate Oliver Ox will replace Bruno Famin in the latest leadership change at the French manufacturer.
The move will mark Oakes’ first success in a Formula 1 management role, and comes less than a year after the Oakes-run Hitech GP team failed in its bid to join the Formula 1 grid.
Before taking over at Hitech, Oakes – now 36 and often referred to on the circuit as – was a promising racing driver whose career quickly ended.
He won the karting world title in 2005 in a race that included the likes of Jules Bianchi and Valtteri Bottas as well as Formula E regular Edo Mortara and current Le Mans 24 Hours champion Miguel Molina.
But his move into motorsports and entry into the then-forming Red Bull Junior Team programme was met with limited success. Ochs won a race in Formula BMW UK, but made little impact on the Formula Renault scene with a two-litre engine.
Red Bull Junior team architect Helmut Marko cited him as an example of a driver who excelled in karting but couldn’t translate his success into motorsport. But the relationship between Marko and Ox clearly remained strong – as evidenced by Red Bull sending several of its juniors to race with Ox in the years to come.
After his junior single-seater career ended at GP3 level – where he drove in his inaugural season in 2010 but was one of six full-time drivers not to score points – Oakes turned to team management, initially on the karting scene.
Hitech GP Team was founded in 2015 as the successor to the Hitech team that was initially founded over a decade earlier, and the team entered Formula 3 initially in Europe but eventually expanded into Formula 2 and other categories.
She has won Formula 2 races with the likes of Luca Ghiotto, Nikita Mazepin, Liam Lawson, Jory Phipps and Jack Crawford, but has yet to win the title.
The team has a major Formula 4 title with current McLaren driver Alex Done from 2022 in the British Formula 4 Series (where he is set to win again this season), and has also won Asian regional championships.
In addition to his Formula 1 exposure, Ochs is likely to be best known to F1 fans for his connections with the Mazepin family – Dmitry Mazepin’s Uralkali team was a major backer of Hitech Group, and Nikita Mazepin spent a large part of his career under Ochs’s guidance.
Mazepin Sr. described Oakes as his son’s “friend, partner, colleague and manager” in 2021, at the end of what turned out to be Mazepin’s only season in Formula 1 with the Haas team.
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