Helmut Marko: A podium is enough for us

According to the results of Friday’s training in Zandvoort, Max Verstappen was only on the 8th line of the protocol and Sergio Perez didn’t even make the top ten.

Admittedly, Max missed a significant part of the first session due to a gearbox failure, but his partner’s car was clearly underspeed on the Dutch circuit. Helmut Marko, Red Bull’s motorsport adviser, explained this by the fact that the team had misjudged the effectiveness of the Hard compound rubber.

“We greatly overestimated the effectiveness of hard tires,” said Marco RacingNews365. “It seemed to us that the car worked well for them, although we assumed that the clutch we wanted would not be. Until we could achieve a good balance, there is no grip and the tires overheat too quickly.

Pérez had all these problems at the same time in the first practice, but at first we thought it was only because of his not the best form, which often doesn’t impress on Friday.

It is possible that the hard tires will not be used in the race at all, so we decided to work with them at the very beginning of the first practice because we just wanted to get rid of them.

All this means that we have to work hard again on Saturday and Sunday to find the settings that will allow us to achieve optimal performance of the machine. So far, that’s a long way off.

In the second practice, the long series of laps turned out to be quite good, as we had already managed to correct something, but the wear on the rubber remained too intense.

And yet Gianpiero Lambiase, Max’s race engineer, has a positive attitude. He said he knows what the problems are, so I’m not worried just yet. Obviously the results on this track are tighter than in Spa, and the corners are slower here. But at least we’re aiming for the podium and that’s enough for us. And both Ferrari and Mercedes can claim victory in Zandvoort.”