Helmut Marko detonates: “If Horner had gone sooner, Max would be champion”
Helmut Marko didn’t shuffle quietly out of Red Bull. He slammed the door.
In a blistering interview with Dutch outlet De Limburger, the 82-year-old claimed Red Bull’s mid‑season sacking of Christian Horner came too late to save Max Verstappen’s title bid — and insisted the Dutchman would have beaten Lando Norris to the 2025 crown had the team acted earlier.
“We had to do something because performance on the track was lagging,” Marko said. “Had we done that earlier, we would have got things up and running faster this year, and Max would have become world champion. I am absolutely convinced of that.”
It’s a provocative line, but it’s not without context. Horner was removed after July’s British Grand Prix, ending more than two decades in charge. Red Bull pulled Laurent Mekies across from Racing Bulls and handed him the CEO and team principal remit. The results arrived. Verstappen, stuck on two wins before the break, peeled off six victories in the final nine races to squeeze McLaren hard. He finished the year on eight wins — one more than both Norris and Oscar Piastri — and still lost the title by two points to Norris.
That narrow defeat fuels Marko’s argument: that Red Bull’s RB21 found its feet only once the power at the top shifted.
Marko, who days ago was himself confirmed as leaving his senior advisor role with parent company Red Bull GmbH, went much further than a sporting what‑if. He accused Horner of “lying” during his tenure and of cozying up to majority shareholder Chalerm Yoovidhya in the months before Red Bull co‑founder Dietrich Mateschitz died in 2022 — part of what he framed as a long, messy internal power struggle between “Austria” and the Thai shareholding.
“Together with Didi [Mateschitz], I founded Red Bull Racing in 2005. We appointed Horner as team principal, and I was there as supervisor. In principle, the power always lay in Austria,” Marko said, claiming Horner later worked to seize control with Yoovidhya’s backing. “On behalf of ‘Austria’, I did everything I could to prevent that from happening.”
He also alleged “dirty games” were played inside the team in recent years. Marko even revisited his own 2023 flashpoint — the widely condemned comment about Sergio Perez’s focus — suggesting, without providing evidence, that it had been “fabricated, perhaps by them.” He apologised for that remark at the time.
Another grenade: Marko said he was wrongly blamed in 2024 for a rumour that Red Bull Powertrains’ development was behind schedule and jeopardising the Ford partnership — a claim he framed as a pretext to suspend him. “Because Max stepped in at Jeddah, it didn’t happen,” he said, referencing the Saudi GP weekend when Verstappen publicly warned Red Bull that losing Marko would be “not good for my situation as well.”
For the record, Marko’s departure this month was presented by Red Bull GmbH as his own decision, something CEO Oliver Mintzlaff said he “deeply regretted.” Marko called that announcement “full of nonsense,” adding that he had to ring Verstappen himself to confirm he was out.
So where does that leave Red Bull? With both Horner and Marko gone by year’s end, the team has undergone the kind of leadership clear‑out it hasn’t faced since its infancy. Mekies, drafted mid‑season, presided over a dramatic upturn in form that still fell short of stopping McLaren’s orange surge. The margins were painfully fine: Verstappen’s late‑season run hauled him to within a whisker of a fourth straight championship, and yet it’s Norris who leaves 2025 with the big trophy.
Marko’s contention — that an earlier reset would have delivered the title — is impossible to prove, and far from universally shared inside the paddock. But the facts do underline his narrative beats: Red Bull’s winter swagger evaporated fast, McLaren seized control, and only after the upheaval on the pit wall did the RB21 look like its old self.
The subtext to all of this is Verstappen. His loyalty to Marko has been explicit, his patience with internal politics limited. He spoke up when talk of a Marko suspension surfaced in early 2024. He then nearly dragged Red Bull to another title in the second half of 2025. If you’re looking for the next big storyline, it’s not so much who said what about whom — it’s how Red Bull keeps the driver who almost bailed them out again fully on board for the long game.
Because amid the accusations and score‑settling, the sporting truth is blunt: Red Bull, for the first time in years, didn’t win. And now, stripped of the two men who helped build its modern era — one by choice or not, depending on who you believe — it has to prove that the Mekies era can deliver what the last one, finally, did not.
