Although Mercedes, eight times consecutive Formula 1 constructors’ champions, is 101 points behind the leader of the 2022 season standings, Red Bull, after seven races, the Austrians’ adviser, Helmut Marko , continues to consider them “dangerous”. “.
This is so because the member of the energy drink crowd has seen that the silver arrows can occasionally set the best times. As for the general drivers, the current champion, Max Verstappen, has a gap of 41 points with respect to the first of the Mercedes couple, George Russell, and 75 units over Lewis Hamilton, but in Red Bull they look closely at the W13 , especially after the Barcelona updates.
“Mercedes is doing incredibly fast laps in practice and in the races, both with Hamilton and with Russell,” Marko told Motorsport.com Germany’s sister website Formel1.de . “Not always, so for us it’s hard to interpret where these times come from, I’ve heard people from Mercedes, and I think they don’t know either.
“The dangerous thing is that the potential seems to be there, and once that can be brought out in the race, they will be up there or at the front,” continued one of the Milton Keynes-based team’s top officials.
Asked if he thought Mercedes had bluffed his actual speed early in the campaign, he replied: “No, it’s not a bluff. That was when they had that weird engine advantage, and last year, the Hamilton was doing it a lot, so I don’t buy it.”
“It’s really hard to understand where this [car is] incredibly fast, they are fast over one lap, but it doesn’t last very long,” he added. “What changes there, why can’t they drive like that continuously, it’s just, thank God, that’s still the problem, I think.”
The Red Bull adviser also indicated that he believes that the German car is “at his level” above the minimum weight of about 5 kilograms, and that both are behind Ferrari in this regard: “I think Ferrari is more or less at the limit”.
“The positive thing is that there is a reserve of a few tenths when reaching the minimum weight, but you can’t do that overnight,” said one of the most visible faces of the group that defends the drivers’ title with Verstappen.
