Red Bull chief smiles: 'You said it was over at the time'

The season started off poorly for Red Bull Racing with a double DNF in Bahrain, but the team of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez has managed to recover well. Despite Verstappen also dropping out in Australia with technical problems, Red Bull now holds the lead in both world championships. It more than satisfies Helmut Marko.

Red Bull lead World Championship

"You all said after his second failure that it was over for us, but I said at the time that we still had plenty of races to go and we would bounce back," Marko jokingly says to De Telegraaf. The RB18 is a very competitive car, although it is important for the Austrians that all the teething problems are fixed quickly.

On Saturday, Verstappen's DRS faltered at the decisive moment in Q3, causing him to miss out on a possible pole position. A day later, the reigning world champion again struggled with a rear wing that wouldn't open up. It compressed the 24-year-old Dutchman's race, but frustrations ran high at the halfway point.

Red Bull gets Verstappen calm

Indeed, Verstappen was stuck behind George Russell for laps. Together the DRS worked, but more often than not it didn't. It caused a lot of cursing and yelling over the team radio at the new leader in the World Championship. Red Bull managed to calm Verstappen down at some point, Marko explained afterwards.

They didn't have many other options either. "There was no point for us to explain where the problem came from either, because he had to focus on the race. It was the same problem as Saturday. There was nothing he could do about it." According to Marko, it has everything to do withthe updates Red Bull introduced this weekend.