Helmut Marko: We are not thinking about team tactics yet

An interesting situation arises for the Red Bull Racing team: thanks to victories in Saturday’s sprint and yesterday’s race, Sergio Perez reduced the gap with his partner to six points.

“We were in a favorable situation because Alonso, Leclerc and the Mercedes drivers were all engrossed in each other’s battle for third place,” Helmut Marko told Austrian broadcaster ORF after the finish of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. – There is a constant rivalry between them and we are so confident in the championship lead, also for this reason. But there are still 19 races to go, so we are not thinking about applying team tactics yet.”

After Max Verstappen’s pit stop and the appearance of the safety car on track, Perez took the lead in the race and a real duel broke out between the partners, their cars crashing into the bumpers at times – it was clear that both were in serious trouble. danger. At one point, the Mexican even asked the team to intervene in what was happening.

“Sergio asked if he could slow down, but then Max would have to slow down too, so we said no,” explained Red Bull Motorsport Advisor, who celebrated his 80th birthday last weekend. “We let them race at full speed, so they gave it their all in the last laps. Everyone saw that they were alternating fast laps, but when George Russell got a fresh set of Soft tyres, it became clear that they had no chance of resisting.

We are very happy with the result, although Max was unlucky because of the safety car. In addition, he had to change the settings during the race to achieve the optimal behavior of the car, but in the end he was able to drive at the same pace as Sergio.

Verstappen is to be commended, he was very fast from the start, made no mistakes and generally drove a competent race. But we were concerned that Charles and Fernando were running at the same pace as our drivers for the last six or eight laps. Although before that we were a second faster than the others. But it confirms that we have to keep working hard so that we don’t end up in a bad situation at the end of the season.

We have excellent racers, each of them is strong in its own way – Sergio performs well on city tracks, Max – on ordinary tracks. If I remember correctly, we won the race in Miami last year, but Sergio had problems with the engine towards the end of the distance, which prevented him from attacking Sainz.

We know that we can fight for wins with our car, but for this everything has to go well, first of all I am talking about qualifying, because not all circuits can be overtaken as easily as in Baku. So somehow we have to make sure that the pace in qualifying was at Ferrari level.