‘I’ll sleep on it’: Helmut Marko hints his Red Bull era may be nearing the end
Helmut Marko rarely blinks. Not in a press scrum, not in a crisis, and certainly not when Red Bull are reshuffling the furniture around him. But in Abu Dhabi, the 82-year-old sounded like a man weighing up the last big decision of a formidable F1 life.
“It’s not in doubt,” he began, then let the door crack open. “I will have a discussion, and then I’ll see what I do… I have to see… have to sleep over it, and then we see.”
Marko has been welded into Red Bull’s Formula 1 operation since Dietrich Mateschitz bought Jaguar in 2004, an original pillar of the project and the last major figure from the founder’s inner circle still in place after Mateschitz’s passing in 2022. His role as Red Bull Racing director and long-time motorsport advisor — the man with a decisive hand on the junior driver program — has survived any number of storms. This latest one feels different.
Red Bull’s power structure was reshaped this summer, with Laurent Mekies stepping in as team principal following Christian Horner’s exit, while Red Bull GmbH chief Oliver Mintzlaff consolidated oversight from the parent company. That inevitably pulled the spotlight onto Marko’s future, and it hasn’t left him since.
The timing of all this is no accident. Lando Norris slipped past Max Verstappen to win the 2025 Drivers’ Championship by a slender margin, a result that will sting in Milton Keynes no matter how defiant the faces. Marko spoke glowingly about the race and the fight, but when the questions turned to whether his heart still beats as loudly for this job as it once did, he called it “a complex of different things.” For a man famed for short answers and longer memories, that’s practically a monologue.
Behind the scenes, a succession plan has been discussed for months, according to multiple paddock sources, with names like Sebastian Vettel and Gerhard Berger floated in quiet conversations. Tension with the new management axis has been whispered about, the kind of fraying that happens when a long-time power broker keeps making unilateral calls — particularly on junior signings — in a structure now designed for consensus.
One flashpoint came around the Qatar Grand Prix, when Marko’s remarks about Kimi Antonelli sparked a wave of social-media bile directed at the 18-year-old Italian. Inside the camp, that episode didn’t land well. Whether it hardened opinions or simply confirmed existing ones depends on who you ask, but the direction of travel feels clear: Red Bull are changing, and every part of the organization is being asked to change with it.
Mekies, for his part, was generous in public and careful not to slam any doors. “Helmut has been incredible in how supportive he has been in helping us turn things around this year,” he said, acknowledging the high-wire act of a season that required big, sometimes brutal, calls. “Formula 1 is not a static environment. You always adjust your organisations… it’s completely normal that we review how we can improve the way we operate all the time.
“I’m not saying that specifically for Helmut,” he added, which of course says it specifically enough.
There’s no finality yet. Senior voices at Red Bull have pushed back against chatter that U.S. partners were told 2025 would be Marko’s swansong, and the official line remains pragmatic: status quo for now, then a frank post-season debrief. But the veteran Austrian knows how these stories end. He’s been the author of a few of them himself.
If this is the last lap of the Marko era, it won’t be a quiet coast to the flag. He’s been central to Red Bull’s identity, a lightning rod and kingmaker in equal measure. And as Verstappen and Red Bull plot how to wrest the title back in 2026, the question is whether that rebuild is best served with Marko still in the room — or with a new voice steering the next generation.
For now, he’ll sleep on it. The rest of the paddock won’t.
