While Christian Horner believes Red Bull's decline in performance during the second-half of the 2024 season was not due to Adrian Newey's departure, external advisor Helmut Marko is not on the same page as the British team principal.
The 2024 season begin the way 2023 ended for Red Bull Racing. Max Verstappen was dominant early on, however, a few races into the season, the picture has changed. During the Miami GP, it was also announced that master designed Adrian Newey will leave the Austrians. As the season continued, the RB20 performed worse, and was often behind Ferrari and McLaren in terms of performance.
Marko on Newey's departure
Team principal Christian Horner said in September that there is no correlation between the RB20 performance and Newey's departure, but Helmut Marko does not agree. The Austrian sees that things only got worse for the team since the Briton left, while Horner only tries to downplay the situation.
"We had started well and dominated, but since Newey left, our engineers have actually had a bit of a hard time getting the most out of the car," Marko began.
"Although things were gradually moving in the right direction towards the end of the season and we can say that we are very optimistic for the future, the truth is that from Miami onwards, the teams hoping for victory became four, as McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes had joined the competition, by turns," the Austrian concluded to Autosprint.
This article was written in collaboration with Estéban den Toom
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