Helmut Marko thought about resigning?

Red Bull Racing started the new season with a winning double, the team’s preparation has made a strong impression and is regarded as the championship favourite. Behind the scenes, however, events are taking place that do not yet clearly manifest themselves, but raise questions that until recently were not on the agenda at all.

This is due to the mood of Red Bull’s top management, which gradually began to change after the death of Dietrich Mateschitz. It is rumored that Oliver Mintzlaff, who is in charge of business projects and investments in an Austrian company, is not very interested in car racing and that he does not have the best relationship with Helmut Marko.

Speedweek, part of the Red Bull media empire, recently quoted the following comment from a motorsport adviser to the company: “Minzlaff and I have met twice. He shared some of his thoughts, and how he will accept our ideas will become clear later. The Red Bull Racing team has always been a very independent division.

Now that is not the case, because after every training and match I have to report. We are no longer talking about open, personal and friendly relations. Dietrich had his own vision, he was a very emotional person. I can’t see it anymore.

I am a free person and can stop at any time if the work no longer brings me pleasure. Let’s see how it goes in the future.”

Marco played a special and very important role in making the Red Bull Racing team so successful in Formula 1, and this role is similar to that of his old friend Niki Lauda during his time at Mercedes. Mateschitz Marko, a former racing driver, had a friendly trusting relationship that developed several decades ago, when he had not yet completed his sports career.

On everything related to Red Bull Racing, Marko reported personally only to Mateschitz and had the freedom to make most of the decisions, in particular he was solely responsible for the team’s youth programme. It was he who played a fundamentally important role in the fact that Max Verstappen became a Red Bull driver in 2014, made his debut in Formula 1 a year later and won his first championship title in 2021 for the team from Milton Keynes.

Marco turns 80 next month, and all those years he ran Red Bull’s motorsport programs he didn’t really report to anyone, just did the tasks assigned to him very effectively. I solved all the problems directly with Mateschitz, but now the situation is changing and it is not at all the case that Marco wants to adapt to this. He was not used to the traditional corporate hierarchy, and after Mateschitz’s death, this culture will probably gradually take root in Red Bull.

In any case, there will be some changes and it is no coincidence that there is talk of the possible imminent sale of the AlphaTauri team or the move to the UK. According to The Race, the source of these rumors was most likely someone within the company who deliberately leaked so that the general public would be informed of the plans for such reforms. It is possible that this will at least make the new management of the company think and weigh everything up.

If we talk about the current situation of Red Bull Racing, everything looks very normal outwardly: the team is considered the favorite of the season, one of the strongest racers in the world plays for it and strategic agreements have already been signed with Ford .

At the same time, it cannot be ruled out that Helmut Marko’s influence on this whole situation will gradually diminish and we can expect him to step down from his post in the not-so-distant future.