F1, Red Bull: for Helmut Marko Max Verstappen is not good for teammates

Helmut Marko unabashedly.

Red Bull’s longtime consultant Helmut Marko gave an interview on CarandDriver.com in which he gave Max Verstappen’s teammates no hope, acknowledging the Dutch driver’s superiority.

“Having Max as a teammate is not good for your career,” Marko began, “Max is very special. He was trained by his father very hard, but successfully, his teammates compare their cars with his and think, ‘How can I beat him?’ They can’t, so they try to change the set-up of the car or adapt their driving style.”

“It’s obvious that you can’t accept that you’re not as good as him. But at some point you have to recognize that there is someone special and that you cannot beat him. It’s my job to make him understand that. Is it cruel? I don’t think so,” concluded the former Austrian driver.

It was Sebastian Vettel who was the first driver to win a world championship with Red Bull. The German put everyone in line for four years in a row, from 2010 to 2013. The Austrian stable returned to success in 2021 thanks to Dutchman Max Verstappen, with the son of art repeating the following year. If there was a battle to the last in 2021, that was not the case in 2022.