Rob Marshall: Wins still don’t come easy

Rob Marshall’s Formula 1 career began nearly three decades ago when he moved, then a very young engineer, from Rolls-Royce to the Benetton team.

He worked there until 2005, when it was already called Renault F1, and was one of those who created the R25, the championship car of Fernando Alonso. But in 2006, Rob switched to Red Bull Racing, which was only spending its second season in the World Championship and has not changed tracks since.

There he became one of the closest associates of Adrian Newey, technical director of the young team, and, of course, gradually took up more and more senior positions. Now he is the chief designer, so Max Verstappen’s victories on the Formula 1 circuits include the achievements of Marshall and his colleagues.

“Mercedes dominance lasted a very long time and it was very difficult for us during this period, but now we are in a great mood! he shared during his participation in the F1 Nation podcast. – We won the title last year and now we repeated the success – this is a special achievement.After the Australian Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc was more than 40 points ahead and we knew it would not be easy to recoup that.

Wins are still not easy, but in the first half of the year the Ferrari car was better and faster than the RB18, but even then our speed advantage was very small, I wouldn’t call it overwhelming.

When there is a transition to a new technical regulation it is difficult to predict how well you have acted in developing the car, but when we arrived at the first pre-season testing we immediately realized that we are not inferior to the leaders. In addition, we saw that we do not have the difficulties that others have experienced.

We didn’t feel the RB18 was a triumph of design ideas, but most importantly, we avoided any obvious miscalculations when developing the chassis. In this car, everything is brand new, down to the last bolt – a different concept of aerodynamics, a different suspension, a different gearbox. It has almost nothing of last year’s model.

Theoretically, our development could not have been successful, but fortunately things turned out differently. Of course there were some problems, but they weren’t too serious, we solved them gradually and this allowed us to increase the speed.

Max Verstappen has had an exceptionally good season, almost flawless, showing his best qualities at every race, achieving high results and immediately starting to prepare for the next one.

At the same time, we have already fully transitioned to development of the car for next year, so the car will remain virtually unchanged until the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, updates will be minimal.”