Red Bull chief Helmut Marko remarks Max Verstappen lost around 50 points against Lewis Hamilton without any fault of the Dutchman.
Red Bull and Mercedes are in an intense battle for the championship. However, luck is a massive factor in such extreme situations, and apparently, it swung on both courts.
Red Bull chief Helmut Marko talks about how some unfortunate moments hit his team hard. He claims that his star driver Max Verstappen lost around 50 points without any unforced errors.
Meanwhile, he also points out the moments where his rival Lewis Hamilton got lucky. And in the end, the difference between the drivers is 12 points.
“Before the last three races, we actually feared that we would be significantly behind,” Marko told Autosport. “The bottom line is that we scored more points than Hamilton in those Grand Prix, mainly because of Hamilton’s race in Turkey where he was only fifth, while Max finished second in Sochi – certainly by luck as well, because of the rain.”
“But even more remarkable is: we innocently lost Baku, lost Silverstone and lost Hungary. If you calculate the number of points we lost carefully, it’s over 50 points in those three races.”
“As a result we are only 12 points ahead now. So we have survived all those setbacks and we have also been able to match the upswing from Mercedes.”
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Only two wins away, Max Verstappen
Marko believes that if Verstappen wins the next two races, they can relax a bit. And the track suitability is allowing him to bank on Mexico City and Sao Paulo.
#OTD in 2017 Max Verstappen won the Mexican Grand Prix from Valtteri Bottas & Kimi Räikkönen. Lewis Hamilton finished 9th but still clinched his fourth title while Sebastian Vettel finished 4th but became the fourth driver with 50 poles #F1 pic.twitter.com/qdbmPAlbnY
— F1 History & Stats (@F1HistoryStats) October 29, 2021
“Looking at the remaining races, I think we have to win at least two more races to be reasonably safe or, let’s say, confident going into the final race,” he said.
“The high altitude tracks of Brazil and Mexico should suit us significantly better. It’s just that so much has already happened this season. So-called Mercedes tracks weren’t Mercedes tracks in the end and the same goes for Red Bull tracks.”
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