Helmut Marko: Verstappen is ‘practically running’ Red Bull after seismic 2025 shake-up
Helmut Marko hasn’t been gone long, but he’s already calling the view from the sofa a “good solution.” The long-time Red Bull powerbroker says Max Verstappen has grown into a figure who doesn’t just lead from the cockpit — he now sets the tone for the entire operation.
“Max has become such a leader now, he doesn’t need advice anymore – he’s practically running the team,” Marko told F1-Insider in a candid debrief a few months on from his departure.
It’s been a year of upheaval at Milton Keynes. Since the passing of Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz in 2022 the structure has steadily evolved, but 2025 was the jolt: both Christian Horner and Marko exited, and fresh faces — including Laurent Mekies — stepped into a reshaped leadership group. According to Marko, the on-track product didn’t suffer. “The team has developed very well since the summer break, after Horner’s departure,” he said, adding that he “sees everything is in good hands.”
For Verstappen, this is the natural end point of a long arc. The Dutchman arrived as a teenager with raw speed and rough edges and, under Marko’s watch, became the era’s benchmark. Now a father with what Marko jokingly framed as a domestic menagerie — “cats and dogs” — Verstappen is, in the Austrian’s view, operating at a level where outside guidance is redundant. “He’s clearly one of the greats in motorsport, if not the greatest. It would be presumptuous of me to add anything to that.”
There’s also a human beat to the exit. Marko admitted he had already been weighing up retirement, eyeing a neat chapter close if Verstappen’s push for a fifth title landed. It didn’t — and the near-miss sharpened the moment. “Together with GP [Giampiero Lambiase], Max Verstappen’s engineer, I was actually convinced that we could and would win this fifth title. The disappointment was all the greater then. GP didn’t recover for a quarter of an hour,” Marko recalled. “Beforehand, I had already considered that a fifth title would have been a good reason to step down. After some further consideration, I came to the conclusion that the fact that we didn’t win it was also a reason to quit.”
There had been paddock whispers that the parent company wanted a tighter grip on the F1 outfit and that the move wasn’t entirely Marko’s call. He batted that away, insisting the timing suited him. The upside of life after F1? No 24-hour dash to Melbourne. “I’m already enjoying the thought that I don’t have to fly to Australia in February. I’m arranging my TV viewing so that I have all the information I’m used to – because without sector times and things like that, a race is hard to read.”
Strip away the nostalgia and the subtext is stark: Verstappen’s influence at Red Bull has never been heavier. The Verstappen–Lambiase axis has long been the team’s competitive metronome, and with the leadership deck reshuffled, it’s only more central. For rivals hoping the post-Marko/Horner era would blunt the Red Bull machine, that’s not exactly encouraging.
From here, the story splits in two. There’s the short term — Verstappen as the unambiguous compass for development direction and in-race calls — and then there’s the looming transition toward 2026, where the team’s power unit project with Ford becomes the next big stress test. Verstappen has already been clear that adaptability will be the currency of the new ruleset; if he’s as embedded in the technical conversation as Marko suggests, Red Bull’s trajectory into that next cycle will have his fingerprints all over it.
For now, Marko’s content to watch it from a distance, stopwatch still handy, remote within reach. The old talent scout sounds serene. The protégé he backed at 16 is now the spine of the team he leaves behind. And if Verstappen truly is “practically running” Red Bull, the rest of the grid knows exactly who they’ll have to beat — on Sundays, and well before then in the simulator and the briefing room.
