Helmut Marko, who is somewhat suddenly departing from Red Bull, was the enabler who translated his friend Dietrich Mateschitz’s racing dreams into reality. The two met in 1969 when Marko was a budding superstar driver on the way up and Mateschitz was a fan, two years Marko’s junior. Marko was competing in a hillclimb event and Mateschitz introduced himself. The two hit it off and would remain close friends right through until Mateschitz’s passing in 2022.
That is the backdrop you need to understand Marko’s role at Red Bull. He reported to no-one – not even Mateschitz; he just advised. Mateschitz empowered him. Quite apart from looking after the junior driver programme, Marko was the man who essentially got the Red Bull F1 team up and running after it took over the former Jaguar team.
It was Marko who laid down how it was going to be to the incumbent management, but in such a way they took umbrage and left. His style is blunt, his tolerance of bullshit non-existent. But there is humour there and great racing wisdom.
Driver talent is his specialist subject. But not only talent. He was always looking for what the supporting qualities were and the Red Bull junior programme became notorious for how ruthlessly conducted it was. It has given plenty of opportunities through the junior categories over the years but staying on the conveyor belt was not easy. Which is as it should be given that Red Bull was looking for future world champions, not merely potential F1-level drivers.
“I get a lot of shit about the drivers we drop,” he smiled once, “but most of those guys even though they might not make it to F1 go on to make several hundred thousand a year as professional racers, which they probably wouldn’t have done without our help.”
He was a refreshing presence in a PR-dominated paddock and it was often amusing watching Red Bull personnel scatter into action as he was seen talking to journalists.
I was once chatting with Christian Horner in the Red Bull team unit at Suzuka, the windows looking out into the paddock and as a journalist approached Marko there and Helmut began talking, so Horner’s utterance of, “Oh, shit…” was very characteristic of the whole energy of the place. Marko – uniquely plugged into the mains during Mateschitz’s time – was very much part of that energy.
He remains a great source of F1 old-time anecdotes too. He accompanied his former track rival and later close friend Niki Lauda on his initial talks with Enzo Ferrari and the later dissolution talks between them.
He did so from a position of some experience – he’d been about to be announced as a Ferrari F1 and sports car driver for the following year when his career was brutally curtailed by the loss of an eye in the 1972 French Grand Prix. A qualified lawyer, a patron of the arts, a painter, an arboriculturist (cultivation and management of trees), he’s much more than the general perception of him as the blunt and ruthless operator.
But he has retained the fierce independence of the guy who refused the golden chains of his law family parents. There’s no one else quite like him.
