Red Bull’s Helmut Marko has delivered a stark assessment of the team’s performance after its São Paulo Grand Prix weekend descended further into gloom after Saturday’s dismal qualifying.
For the first time since 2006, both Red Bull cars were eliminated in Q1, leaving Max Verstappen starting 16th and teammate Yuki Tsunoda down in 19th, a humbling sight for the four-time world champion and his championship ambitions.
It was actually the first time in the Dutchman’s F1 career that he failed to exit Q1 on pure pace, having previously missed the cut on occasion due to penalties or power unit changes.
Verstappen’s struggles were compounded by the team’s attempts to tweak the RB21 after the Sprint race. But Marko’s verdict was unequivocal.
A Bleak Autopsy of Failure
“It went badly wrong. We got slower everywhere. The track got faster and we lost time in all sectors,” he told Sky Germany.
“There was actually even less grip. Why? That's what we have to find out now. But the harm has been done. Now we'll see what we can still make of it. But it doesn't look good.”
The damage is clear. Having already fallen 39 points behind championship leader Lando Norris after the Sprint, Verstappen now faces a daunting challenge from the back of the grid. The odds of mounting a realistic title push now appear increasingly slim.
“That means we didn't gain anything there, but with the others we clearly lost.”
Echoes of Mexico's Mirage
The rot, it seems, traces back to the high-altitude headaches of Mexico, where Red Bull gambled on fresh components in a bid to stem the tide. Partial upgrades, whispered promises of revival, instead sowed the seeds of this São Paulo slump.
When pressed on the root causes plaguing the team across these back-to-back Americas rounds, Marko dissected the missteps with surgical precision, his tone a dirge for dashed expectations.
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"We brought new parts or partially new parts in Mexico, which did not bring the hoped-for success. On that basis we thought we would find the right direction, but that has not been the case now either."
The fallout was surgical in its cruelty: no gains where they were desperately needed, only losses compounding like interest on a bad debt.
"So we have to look at where we have taken the wrong turn," Marko continued. "Because this backlog... Especially the fact that we lost time in sectors one and three, while the deficit in sector two remained the same.
“That means we didn't gain anything there, but with the others we clearly lost."
Fading Lights on the Title Horizon
As night fell over the paddock, the championship calculus turned grim. Verstappen's title hopes, once a blaze of inevitability, now smolder in the embers of what-ifs and why-nots.
With an RB21 off the pace across multiple sectors and no clear solution in sight, the São Paulo Grand Prix could mark a pivotal low point in what had been expected to be a dominant season.
As Marko’s words underline, “the harm has been done”, and Red Bull will need more than tweaks to claw back competitiveness – starting from the back of the grid in a championship battle that looks increasingly precarious.
Sunday's race looms as a salvage operation at best, a funeral procession at worst.
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