Helmut Marko warns of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell ‘fear’

01/10/2023

Christian Horner on Red Bull's success and hints at next step

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Helmut Marko has warned Red Bull fears Lewis Hamilton and George Russell more than Ferrari, even though Mercedes lacked pace last session. Marko has suggested Red Bull are more concerned about the Silver Arrows in 2023 even though Ferrari were their nearest challenger last season.

The Red Bull chief has suggested Mercedes have already got the better of Ferrari after mistakes for the Italian marque last season. The Prancing Horse were blighted with reliability woes and strategy mistakes while they dropped back from the leaders after the summer break.

Mercedes eventually began to leapfrog the Scuderia and even pushed Red Bull for race wins by the end of the campaign. Marko stressed: “I would say that we should fear Mercedes more.

“Mainly because they have an advantage over Ferrari in terms of strategy and reliability.” Marko also predicted the field to be “much closer” next season as teams get a hang of the new 2022 rules package.

Dampening Red Bull’s expectations, he suggested the team’s advantage was not close to Mercedes’ dominance at the start of the turbo-hybrid era in 2014 despite the team winning more races. Max Verstappen picked up a record-breaking 15 race wins with Sergio Perez another two.

Red Bull’s 17 wins outscored Mercedes’ 16 victories in 2014 but there were four fewer races on the current calendar. Marko added: “Our situation is certainly not like that of Mercedes at the beginning of the hybrid era.

We don’t have an immense lead with the engine right now. So that is very different. Mercedes had at least 50bhp margin over all the others back then. And we shouldn’t forget: 2022 has been the first year under this new set of regulations.

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“Other teams have obviously seen what we have done with this year’s car.” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has hinted the German marque’s next challenger will have a different DNA to their current design.

The Austrian hinted this would be an architecture change but does not necessarily mean the car’s bodywork will change. The team has also got a staggering 17 per cent extra wind tunnel time than Red Bull after Christian Horner’s team was docked for winning the championship and breaching F1’s budget cap.

He explained: “It’s going to be very difficult to have a development slope that is steeper than theirs (Red Bull), and also Ferrari – but I believe in the organisation. Fundamentally, it’s not about a lack of downforce, but a problem in making that downforce work on the car.

“With our learnings, the values in the team, the empowerment and the no blame culture, I think we will be back in a more potent form next year – hopefully winning races on merit and fighting for the championship. But is it a given? Certainly not.”

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