Christian Horner's dismissal from the position as CEO of Red Bull Racing is not surprising in itself - as rumours have been swirling around in public ever since the infamous sexting conversations were leaked last year. What's more puzzling is the mid-season timing.
Whatever has triggered the move, the Red Bull organisation has given itself an extremely tricky future as it prepares to take on the additional challenge of being an engine manufacturer into a new era of F1, but without the leader who built the whole thing up over 20 years.
Look at any dominant F1 team of the past couple of decades - Schumacher-era Ferrari, Red Bull, and now the latest iteration of McLaren - and the blueprint is very clear: senior management providing a budget and standing back out of the way of an expert, focused pure racing operation.
With Ferrari, it was Luca di Montezemolo and the Fiat corporate people being kept at bay by the forcefield of Ross Brawn, Schumacher and Jean Todt.
At McLaren, now it is the Bahraini shareholders allowing Zak Brown and Andrea Stella to aggressively pursue their vision.
And at Red Bull, it was Dietrich Mateschitz, the benign billionaire soft drinks magnate crazy about F1, providing the budget and leaving Horner to run the show, with Mateschitz's close friend Helmut Marko acting as co-ordinator between the two.
That model only works if those running the show are fairly exceptional people - and Horner was a canny combination of ambition, focus and racing smarts.
He knew he needed to surround himself with the best people to turn what had been the moribund Jaguar team into a Red Bull team with an entirely different energy.
The early years were about laying down that foundation, transferring the skills he'd only recently acquired in running his F3000 team - and mounting a campaign to recruit Adrian Newey.
Once Newey had been shown around the hangars in Austria and got to feel the freewheeling vibration of the whole entity - the absolute anthesis of what was so chafing at his collar at Ron Dennis-controlled McLaren - then the pieces were all in place.
All it took then was a new formula for 2009 to wipe out the accumulated expertise of the big teams - and Red Bull was about to knock down the walls.
Horner's skill was then in keeping that spirit within the team even as it grew and became one of the most successful of all time. It remained a simple, straightforward racing team; operationally sharp, ruthlessly competitive and always striving.
Horner's focus and ambition, Newey's creative genius and Mateschitz's enthusiasm and money made for a formidable independent force; powerful yet fleet-footed.
Mateschitz's death at the end of 2022 and the organisation's transition into a more conventional managerial style were always going to present challenges to that blueprint of racing success.
Horner, unfortunately, then ran towards that destiny with his off-track behaviour. It's difficult to see any winners in this.
