formula 1
Personnel quake at Red Bull: Powerful advisor leaves
Updated on December 9, 2025 – 3:53 p.mReading time: 2 minutes
Now it’s official: Red Bull Racing and advisor Helmut Marko are parting ways. The racing team announced this on Tuesday.
Shortly after the furious Formula 1 finale in Abu Dhabi, in which Max Verstappen lost his world title to McLaren driver Lando Norris, an era at Red Bull is coming to an end. Helmut Marko and the racing team are going their separate ways at the end of the year. Red Bull Racing officially announced this on the X platform on Tuesday afternoon. Marko worked as a motorsport consultant for the energy drink company for 20 years.
Marko was once also considered a mentor to Sebastian Vettel; the Heppenheimer won four world championship titles in a row with Red Bull from 2010 to 2013.
“The fact that we narrowly missed the World Championship this season touched me deeply and made it clear to me that now the right moment has come for me to personally end this very long, intense and successful chapter,” said Marko in a statement published by Red Bull on Tuesday: “I have been working in motorsport for six decades, and the past 20 years at Red Bull have been an extraordinary and extremely successful journey. It was a wonderful time in which I was able to help and accompany so many talented people. Everything we achieved and built together “It fills me with pride.”
The former racing driver Marko has worked for Red Bull in Formula 1 since the team was founded in 2005. He had been advising the company on motorsport matters since the 1990s. Marko was a friend of the company’s founder, Dietrich Mateschitz, who died in 2022. With Marko, Red Bull became one of the most successful racing teams in Formula 1: with Vettel and Verstappen, he celebrated a total of eight drivers’ titles and also won six constructors’ world championships.
Marko’s departure will be a bitter blow, especially for world champion Verstappen, who was dethroned by Lando Norris (McLaren). “I hope he stays,” the Dutchman said on Sunday when rumors about the separation emerged. In the power struggle at Red Bull, which had already broken out in 2024 and in the course of which ex-team boss Christian Horner lost his job last summer, Verstappen had publicly linked his fate to that of Marko – the Austrian’s contract actually ran for another year.
But now Marko, the third prominent face from Red Bull’s time of supremacy, is history – before him, alongside Horner, design genius Adrian Newey (Aston Martin) had also left the team.