F1’s biggest agitator thought he won Red Bull’s civil war… It started his rapid spiral to exile

Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko will leave Formula 1 at the end of the season in an epoch-defining move that could influence Max Verstappen’s tenure with the six-time constructors title-winning team.

Marko announced on Tuesday (Wednesday morning AEDT) that he had made the decision to step down from a role he’s held for 21 years, dating back to Red Bull rebranding the former Jaguar team in 2005.

Despite the 82-year-old being contracted to until the end of next year, talks between him and Red Bull CEO Oliver Mintzlaff during the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix concluded with the powerbroker exiting the sport.

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“I have been involved in motorsport for six decades now, and the past 20-plus years at Red Bull have been an extraordinary and extremely successful journey,” Marko said.

“It has been a wonderful time that I have been able to help shape and share with so many talented people. Everything we have built and achieved together fills me with pride.

“Narrowly missing out on the world championship this season has moved me deeply and made it clear to me that now is the right moment for me personally to end this very long, intense, and successful chapter.

“I wish the entire team continued success and am convinced that they will be fighting for both world championship titles again next year.”

Speculation was rife during the Abu Dhabi weekend that Marko’s impending exit was effectively a managed one, his relationship with Red Bull management having become strained over the year owing to several flashpoints.

One of those tension points, according to De Limburger, was Marko unilaterally signing Arvid Lindblad to a 2026 Racing Bulls seat in the middle of the year despite no decision having been made about the Englishman’s future at the executive level.

Lindblad will race for the team next year, taking the seat vacated by Red Bull Racing-bound Isack Hadjar.

The Dutch paper further reported that Marko signed Formula 2 star and former McLaren development driver Alex Dunne to the Red Bull junior program despite explicit disagreement from Mintzlaff and Red Bull Racing boss Laurent Mekies.

Marko was ordered to cancel the contract, which De Limburger reported came with a considerable payout to the Irishman, who is now reportedly in talks to join Alpine’s junior driver program.

The Austrian’s controversial comments at the Qatar Grand Prix are also said to have played a role in accelerating his exit.

Marko accused Mercedes rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli of handing Lando Norris fourth place to benefit the Briton’s championship campaign against Max Verstappen in Lusail, an allegation Mercedes boss Toto Wolff described as “brainless”.

Antonelli was subsequently subjected to hundreds of death threats, and Red Bull Racing was forced to apologise on Marko’s’ behalf.

The series of gaffes saw him rapidly fall out of favour with Red Bull’s Austrian management, which had previously backed him to keep his job during the political ructions at the team last year.

CEO Mintzlaff, however, insisted that Marko — who is believed to have never missed a grand prix in his more than 20 years with the company — had pulled the trigger on his own career.

“Helmut approached me with the wish to end his role as motorsport adviser at the end of the year,” he said. “I deeply regret his decision, as he has been an influential figure for more than two decades, and his departure marks the end of an extraordinary era.

“After a long and intensive conversation, I knew that I had to respect his wishes, as I gained the impression that the timing felt right for him to take this step.

“Even though his departure will leave a significant gap, our respect for his decision and our gratitude for everything he has done for Red Bull Racing outweigh it.”

Marko’s departure follows the shock exit of former Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner in July. With both having been founding members of the team dating back to 2005, the events of this season signify the end of an era for the F1 powerhouse.

But the changes may not stop there.

Max Verstappen has long been a loyal and powerful ally for Marko, having even threatened to quit the team should the Austrian powerbroker have his place threatened.

Today, however, the Dutchman is either unwilling or unable to prevent the dislodging of another key pillar of the team.

What that means for his own future at Milton Keynes rises as a fascinating question.

WHO IS HELMUT MARKO?

Marko has had links to Red Bull since the 1990s, long before the brand bought into Formula 1.

A former sports car racer and 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, he helmed Red Bull’s junior driver roster — at the time essentially its motorsport sponsorship program.

It was in that capacity that he first worked with Horner, who was running a Formula 3000 team that fielded some of Marko’s drivers.

It was a relationship that would be replicated on a far grander scale in 2005, when Red Bull Racing was formed from the ashes of the minnow Jaguar team.

Marko was called upon by enigmatic Red Bull company founder Dietrich Mateschitz as his motorsport adviser, and it was on the Austrian’s recommendation that Horner was signed as the youngest team principal in Formula 1 history.

Together they formed an unlikely dream team.

Mateschitz ensured the team was well funded by was otherwise a hands-off team owner. Horner was allowed to set it up for success, with Marko acting as a conduit between the team and the energy drinks business.

Marko’s fiefdom was the driver roster, much as it had been in Red Bull’s early days of motorsport sponsorship.

He pioneered the Red Bull junior driver program at a time Formula 1 teams generally didn’t maintain rookie rosters and gave future champions Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel their first full-time F1 contracts, albeit the list of discarded drivers who failed Marko’s infamously ruthless sink-or-swim psychological challenges was far longer.

But his remit extended beyond just driver management thanks in part to his ambiguous position title, usually styled as ‘motorsport adviser’.

At times he appeared to be involved in almost every facet of the brand’s Formula 1 operations, including when Red Bull doubled its team representation by buying the Minardi team and turning it into Toro Rosso, now Racing Bulls, in 2006.

That worked fine with the unconditional backing of Matechitz’s unquestioned authority.

But when the energy drinks mogul died in 2022, Marko found himself a willing participant in an epic struggle for control of Red Bull’s Formula 1 empire.

Horner, his former partner, became his chief adversary.

‘SUCH AN IMPORTANT PILLAR’

Rumours began emerging late in 2023 that the pair had been engaging in clandestine warfare to destabilise each other in the power vacuum left behind by the boss, including by leaking damaging stories to select media outlets to further their own causes.

Factions were wrought in the process.

Marko counted among his allies Red Bull’s new management in Austria, which included Mintzlaff as well as Mateschitz’s son Mark, who inherited his 49 per cent stake in the company.

Horner, meanwhile, counted on his side the Yoovidhya family, the Thai dynasty that invented the original Red Bull recipe and that owns 51 per cent of the business.

The rivalry exploded early in 2024 with revelations of accusations of inappropriate workplace behaviour made against Horner by a female employee.

The scandal dragged much of the secret war into the open, even as Horner was exonerated by two internal investigations.

It was during that time that Marko was caught up in an inquiry into unauthorised leaks to the media, with reports subsequently suggesting the powerbroker could be suspended or sacked from the team.

Ironically that was the moment that may have won him the war.

It was the moment Verstappen revealed himself to be fully committed Marko loyalist.

“I have a lot of respect for Helmut, and what we have achieved together goes very far,” he said. “Also of course my loyalty to him is very big.

“I’ve always expressed this to everyone within the team, everyone high up, that he’s an important part in my decision-making for all the time in the future as well within the team.

“It’s very important that we keep the key people together, because I feel like if such an important pillar falls away — that’s also what I’ve said to the team — that is not good for my situation as well.

“For me Helmut has to stay, for sure.”

It was widely read as a threat: if he goes, I go.

He stayed, and Verstappen stayed.

It considerably weakened Horner’s position, and when the team began floundering halfway through this year — at which point Verstappen was openly talking with Toto Wolff about a possible future Mercedes driver — the long-time team boss was unceremoniously axed by press release.

Marko had won — or so it seemed.

A PYRRHIC VICTORY

De Limburger reported that Marko treated Horner’s sacking as an absolute victory for his cause. As far as he was concerned, the Red Bull F1 program was back under his control, just as it fundamentally had been in the days of Mateschitz’s ownership.

But that’s not how Red Bull works. Far from proving Marko right, Horner’s dismissal in fact set him up to fall.

The sacking of Horner has a multitude of motivations, not least on-track performance and the ensuing restlessness from the Verstappen camp that was causing simmering and destabilising tensions at Milton Keynes.

He was also judged to have amassed too much power over the F1 program during his two decades as team principal effectively a law unto himself.

Reportedly it was his refusal to give up his expanding commercial responsibilities that convinced management in Austria to dislodge him.

In doing so it affirmed its position that Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls were not sovereign entities; they were arms of the Red Bull business connected directly back to Salzburg.

That didn’t suit Horner. It also didn’t suit Marko.

The signs have been clear that the Austrian powerbroker’s influence has been diminishing.

Management of the driver program has been prised from his grasp in recognition that, for its past successes, greater rewards are on offer for teams that hone few potential stars over several years rather than shaking the snow globe to see where the ice crystals land.

Without that anchor point, his ambiguous role has become increasingly defined by him throwing grenades in the media, undermining the team’s attempt to stay on message at critical times or causing conflagrations like he did with his comments in Qatar.

Horner’s dismissal brought with it a bump in performance thanks in part to the calmer and more focused atmosphere under the narrower remit of new team boss Mekies.

An engineer by trade and a scalpel where Horner was a hammer, Mekies’s cool running of the team only sharpened the contrast with old-school Marko, who was increasingly unmoored from formal responsibility and increasingly a liability to the team.

Whether he was pushed or saw the writing on the wall doesn’t matter. Marko followed his adversary out the exit door just months later, their fates fundamentally the same at a team that was ready to move on to its next era.

WHAT NEXT FOR VERSTAPPEN?

Marko and Horner’s exits followed the departures of other foundational team members: Adrian Newey, who decamped for Aston Martin; Jonathan Wheatley, now the Audi team principal; chief designer Rob Marshall, now at McLaren, and Will Courtenay, who is still serving out his notice period as head of race strategy before joining McLaren as sporting director.

It couldn’t be more emphatically the end of an era.

The staff exodus has touched Verstappen more directly too, having lost his number one mechanic, his performance engineer and two trackside engineers. There’s also speculation longtime race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will quit that role next year for personal reasons.

It raises questions about Verstappen’s place in the team, which is rapidly looking dramatically different to the one he signed up to in early 2022 on a seven-year deal.

Early last year the Dutchman was willing to flex a reported clause in his contract that allowed him to leave the team if Marko left.

Intriguingly, however, Marko suggested in an interview with De Telegraaf that this clause has been changed or removed “to lay the foundation for a successful company for the foreseeable future”.

Still, clause or no clause, Verstappen’s loyalty is unlikely to have evaporated just because it’s no longer codified in a contract.

There are two possibilities here.

The first is that Verstappen is satisfied with the changes he’s seen. There’s no doubt he’s been much happier under team boss Mekies than he was in the final weeks of Horner’s reign, even if his personal relationship with the former principal remains strong.

The team proved it could turn the ship around despite a dire 12 months of underachievement, which is exactly what he’ll have wanted to see going into the unknown of next year’s regulations.

Perhaps, despite his loyalty, he too sees Marko moving on as a necessary next step for a team entering a new era.

The second it that it could be that there’s no downside to Red Bull Racing putting Verstappen off-side because his contract is so open anyway.

Reports this year suggested that Verstappen will be able to activate an exit clause on his deal if he’s outside the top two in the drivers championship in the middle of this season.

If he were inside the top two, it would suggest he’s in a championship-contending car, in which case he wouldn’t be motivated to leave in the first place. If the car is anything less than that, he’s free to walk regardless of losing the clause tying him to Marko.

In that way Marko’s exit really changes nothing for Verstappen. Performance has always been the only thing that matter to him.

It’s up to Red Bull Racing to prove its new structure can deliver that performance, otherwise he’s out the door no matter whose name is above it.