Helmut Marko isn’t one for sugar-coating. After a Friday at Zandvoort that saw McLaren strut through both practice sessions, Red Bull’s motorsport advisor cut straight to it: “McLaren is untouchable.”
It didn’t feel like an exaggeration. Lando Norris topped FP1 ahead of Oscar Piastri as McLaren locked out the morning, and Norris returned to the top again in FP2. Fernando Alonso kept Aston Martin in the conversation with a late flyer just a whisker off the benchmark, while Lance Stroll’s day ended early with a crunch into the barriers after just seven laps. As for the home favourite? Max Verstappen wasn’t seriously in the mix on single-lap pace and finished FP2 in fifth, having made a rare mistake in FP1 and ended up beached at Turn 1.
From the Red Bull pit wall, the picture looked familiar: flashes of long-run promise, but a balance window they’ve still not nailed. “Aston Martin is surprisingly fast,” Marko admitted, before drawing the battle lines for Saturday. “It’s a fight behind for P3 between Aston Martin, Mercedes, and us.”
That’s a very un-2023 sentence, and yet it’s very 2025. McLaren’s Friday muscle has been a recurring theme this season, and there was authority about the way they moved through the day here. Norris had air under him in FP1, three tenths clear of Piastri, with everyone else half a second back. When Alonso trimmed that gap in FP2, it only sharpened the point: McLaren are in the groove early, Aston Martin are alive to it, and there’s work to do elsewhere.
Red Bull did bring something to this fight. The RB21 appeared with a tweaked front wing, but Marko called the gains “marginal” and kept circling back to balance. The car’s friendlier on harder rubber, he suggested, which at least points them toward a race-day route. “The harder the compound, the better we are,” he said. “For the race, for sure, it’s a medium/hard race with one stop, so our hopes are in this direction.”
That reads like the classic Zandvoort playbook: control the sliding, manage the fronts, and keep track position. It also reads like a team triangulating around its weak point rather than smashing it head-on. “Normally, it takes till Saturday until our setup is working,” Marko added, sounding more pragmatic than panicked. The target, in his words, is to be “optimistic for P3.”
The outlier in all this is Aston Martin. Their early-weekend form can be deceptive, but Marko wasn’t reaching for the usual caveats about fuel or modes. “After Budapest, something has changed that’s really effective,” he said of the green car. Alonso’s long-run cadence and late-session bite backed that up, and you didn’t need a stopwatch to see the Spaniard looked hooked up.
To be fair to Red Bull, there are worse Fridays than one where a driver clips a gravel trap and you still end the day talking about Sunday tyre life. But the tone is unmistakable. There’s no internal narrative of sandbagging, no playful coyness. When Marko says McLaren are out of range by “three or four tenths on average,” he’s not setting up a grand reveal. He’s calling the fight as he sees it.
What does that mean for Saturday? Red Bull usually find something overnight—they’ve made a habit of creeping toward their sweet spot as the track rubbers in and the programme shifts from sweeping setup work to surgical tweaks. If they hit that window here, Verstappen will at least be in the grid-shaping conversation. But the pecking order feels stark: McLaren on top, Aston Martin poised to pounce, Mercedes lurking, and Red Bull chasing balance while playing the long game.
It’s also worth noting the psychology. Zandvoort belongs to Verstappen’s orange tide, yet on Friday the soundtrack came from elsewhere. Norris and Piastri looked confident enough to make trouble at a circuit where rhythm rewards bravery, and Alonso—well, Alonso’s never needed an invitation.
So yes, Helmut Marko’s headline will travel. It should. It’s rare to hear Red Bull concede the initiative so plainly on a Friday. But it’s also Friday. If there’s one constant in this season’s arc, it’s that the hour before qualifying often tells a different story than the one we heard at lunch. McLaren have the lead role for now. Red Bull think they’ve got the tyres to make act two interesting. And Alonso? He’s already circling the stage lights.
