Helmut Marko: Hamilton edged 2021 on tyres — but Verstappen’s “handicap” is history
Helmut Marko has never had much time for polite mythmaking, and his latest pass through the rear-view mirror doesn’t try. Looking back at the white‑hot 2021 title fight, the long-time Red Bull adviser says Lewis Hamilton held a slight edge over Max Verstappen in one specific craft: tyre management. The key word there is “held.”
“Hamilton was a bit better in ’21,” Marko said on the Beyond the Grid podcast, before adding the sting in the tail: “He’s improving, improving… nowadays [Max] doesn’t make any mistakes. Lap by lap, he’s within one tenth. If they tell him the left tyre is overheating, within two laps he does the same lap time, but the tyre temperature goes down.” In other words, what Marko once called a “handicap” has been scrubbed out.
The trajectory since that bruising 2021 finale hardly needs recounting. Verstappen turned that first crown into an era of his own, rattling off four straight titles. In 2025, he missed a fifth by just two points — a near miss that only seemed to underline how complete his game has become.
Pressed on whether Verstappen is the best he’s seen, Marko didn’t bite, but he didn’t exactly hedge either. “Different periods, different cars,” he said. “But he’s definitely one of the greatest.”
If Verstappen is the standard, Marko’s other reference point is the man who built Red Bull’s first dynasty. Asked to name the team’s two greatest drivers, he didn’t hesitate: “Of course, Max Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel.”
Would they have coexisted happily in the same garage? Marko’s laugh was almost audible. “No. They are completely different characters,” he said. Red Bull never went looking “for a new Vettel” after the German left; they went looking for “a new champion.”
The way Marko draws it, the overlap between Verstappen and Vettel is mental steel. The differences are in how they express it. Vettel, he says, was obsessive in the details from day one, “a little bit like Senna,” living with the engineers, needling at minutiae like fuel mass and balance windows. And when the moment demanded a title charge, the head didn’t wobble. “I remember 2013, we were around, I think, 40 points behind Alonso, and we still won the championship.”
Then there’s the other side of Vettel’s legacy: the elbows. “If you want to be champion, you are not a gentleman driver,” Marko said, when reminded of Multi‑21 and that 2010 tangle with Mark Webber in Turkey. “Of course, the ego is so big, and you have to be like that to win a championship.” Vettel retired at the end of 2022 with 53 wins and four titles to his name — no more added after leaving Red Bull, but his imprint on the team remains obvious every time they lift another trophy.
Verstappen, though, is cut from his own cloth. Marko called him “a perfect son‑in‑law for every mother,” but flips the switch the moment the belts are pulled tight. “He doesn’t have any compromise,” Marko said. “He goes for it.” You can picture the moments he’s talking about — the late-braking sucker punches, the decisive clears when others feint left-right-left and run out of road. Whether it’s an out‑lap from the pits or lap 60 on a fading set, the rhythm barely flickers.
There’s also the bit that even Marko admits he doesn’t entirely understand: after a grand prix win, Verstappen will sometimes go straight from the paddock to the simulator and run an online race. Call it the modern racer’s fidget. But it speaks to a driver who never lets the edges grow dull, whether he’s chasing marginal tyre surface temps over a stint or simply hunting another hundredth in the virtual world.
All of it adds up to a simple verdict from the man who’s seen both Red Bull eras from inside the garage. Hamilton might have shaded Verstappen on tyre craft in 2021, but that gap closed fast — to the point it doesn’t exist for Marko anymore. And when he draws the Venn diagram of what it takes to be an all‑timer at Red Bull, the center still reads the same: relentless focus, mental granite, and a refusal to lift.
Different periods. Different cars. Same requirement: you have to be that ruthless to win.
