Marco: Max’s car lost 20% downforce

At Silverstone, Max Ferstappen finished outside the top three for the first time in the season. Helmut Marko, Red Bull motorsport adviser, commented on the results of the race, in which the championship leader earned six points for seventh.

Helmut Marko: “We chose soft tires for the first stint and at the start, before the accident, Max overtook everyone! Then we were surprised why Poul was not allowed to start at the restarts. Everything went well after the restart – Max was faster than Ferrari and then Carlos Sainz went off the track.

Max then drove over the wreckage. His reaction was this: the car is uncontrollable. Of course at first we thought he had a flat tire. We called him to the pits, but there we found out that the tires were all right.

Our car has many sensors and cameras. The engineers studied everything and came to the conclusion that the machine is safe to continue the race. We informed him about this and Max shouted: “The car is uncontrollable, something is broken!”

As a result, part of Yuki Tsunoda’s wing was found to be trapped in the Venturi channels, leading to a 20% loss of downforce. If we talk about the time of the circle, then this led to the loss of one and a half to two seconds!

On hard tires the problem worsened as it seemed to Max that there was no downforce at the front of the car either. We even considered getting out to save the bike, but decided to keep going because we were in the top ten. Luckily we still had the Soft kit, after switching to what changed the situation for the better.

Max regained positions and fought against Mick Schumacher at the end of the race. We made the right decision to continue as long as we wear glasses and there are no technical problems with the car.”