Austrian former professional racing driver and current advisor to Red Bull, Helmut Marko, shared his thoughts on the defeat his team endured at the hands of Scuderia Ferrari in the third round of the 2022 Formula One season, the Australian Grand Prix. The Red Bull consultant admitted his team was negatively surprised by the speed and pace of Ferrari’s F1-75 car Albert Park Circuit.
Race pace, or lack of it, was not the only issue encountered by Red Bull in Melbourne last weekend, as their main driver, Max Verstappen, was unable to finish the Australian Grand Prix and had to retire on lap 39 due to a power unit problem which seems to be caused by a fuel leak. This was the second DNF for Max Verstappen in the first three races of the 2022 Formula 1 championship, as he now stands sixth in the drivers’ standings, 46 points behind Charles Leclerc, who leads the standings with 71 points ahead of the 2022 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola.
Helmut Marko revealed the areas Red Bull are suffering from at this stage of the season, pinpointing to the overweight of the RB18 as one of the main problems: “There are two or maybe three different things at play,” Helmut Marko said in a recent interview for Servus TV – “Firstly, the reliability problems, which we hardly had last year, but the lag behind Ferrari was also alarming today. They just controlled the pace and did that without graining. If Max stepped on, Leclerc could react easily,” he explained.
Even Charles Leclerc confirmed after the Australian Grand Prix that according to Ferrari’s simulations, Red Bull should have been faster at the Albert Park Circuit: “Honestly on our paper, maybe we need to review our paper, we were behind Red Bull on this track. We were stronger than what we thought so it was a good surprise.” – he said.
Red Bull also expected to be faster, with Helmut Marko admitting their shock with the Italian side’s performance both in terms of speed and tyre management: “We were negatively surprised by the speed of Ferrari. They had almost no graining and we already had after a few laps. Ferrari can find a good balance with the car more easily,” he lamented.
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The Red Bull consultant, previously a Formula 1 race driver himself, revisited the weight problem affecting the RB18, adding it is another key factor hindering the team this season: “We are clearly heavier than the Ferrari,” he said. “I think we have a weight handicap of about 10 kilograms. Converted to lap time, that equates to about three tenths per lap.”
The 78-year-old is aware that reducing the weight of the car is a very difficult task because it requires time, research and development, which is not straightforward given the limitations imposed by the budget cap: “But lowering the weight is expensive,” he explained. “It’s, to start with, a financial issue and secondly it is also related to reliability, so it is a difficult split due to the budget ceiling. We are facing difficult times,” Marko admitted.
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