Verstappen helped Marko: "As a result, a lot of pressure fell off our shoulders"

Red Bull Racing drove the 300th Grand Prix in the team's history in Turkey, but did not achieve the desired result there. Through the years there have been enormous highlights, including with Max Verstappen.

In 2005 Red Bull embarked on an ambitious project in Formula 1. With the help of Christian Horner, Helmut Marko and later Adrian Newey, Dietrich Mateschitz wanted to see his brand shine in Formula 1. When Marko now looks back on the team's history, he sees many highlights that have been achieved.

For example, the Austrian mentions the victory of Sebastian Vettel in China in 2009, but also their first title in 2010. However, according to Marko, the third highlight is the very first victory for Max Verstappen. After a switch from Toro Rosso to Red Bull Racing, there was a lot of pressure on Red Bull, but in the end, the team was right.

''It was Verstappen's first victory while it was his first race for Red Bull. He was only eighteen years old and therefore the youngest winner of a race. However, there was a lot of pressure from our shoulders, because a year before that we should have gone to so much trouble to get a super license," Marko now says to F1-insider.com.

It turned out that the FIA had got in the way of Verstappen making his debut in Formula 1 after all. ''The FIA made it very complicated and did not want to give that licence to someone of seventeen years of age. Their reasoning was that he wasn't even old enough to get a normal licence, but in the end, they gave in. With retrospective effect, Max's victory showed that we were right," concludes Marko.