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“Seeing Helmut Marko’s angry face” – Former Red Bull pupil reveals his traumatic F1 nightmares

Samriddhi Jaiswal
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"Seeing Helmut Marko's angry face" - Former Red Bull pupil reveals his traumatic F1 nightmares

Former Red Bull driver Jaime Alguersuari reveals that he still gets traumatic F1 nightmares from when he was a Toro Rosso driver.

Jaime Alguersuari is a former Red Bull pupil who raced with the junior team Toro Rosso(now known as AlphaTauri) between 2009-11.

The Spaniard became the youngest driver participating in an F1 race at the 2009 Hungarian GP. Max Verstappen later broke this record in 2015.

Alguersuari, now a DJ, told The Race that while he feels lucky and privileged to have had a Red Bull-backed career in F1, he still carries the trauma of the time he was seen as a Red Bull prospect.

He joined Toro Rosso in the 2009 mid-season, sitting next to Sebastien Buemi. He gave tough competition to his teammate in his two-and-a-half-year stint with the Red Bull junior team.

Yet when Red Bull didn’t see both the drivers as the long-term option, they were sidelined for Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne instead in the junior team.

The Spaniard was often linked with a return to F1 as he got temporarily involved in Formula E, where he didn’t even last a full season after delivering an underwhelming performance.

Also Read: 24-year-old’s father wants to be there when his son clinches 2022 F1 World Championship

Alguersuari struggled to make peace with Red Bull

Speaking to The Race, Alguersuari revealed that when the Milton-Keynes-based team left him out, he struggled to make peace with it.

Even now, when he feels that he has changed, he still gets nightmares. “I tell you something – when I sleep, I still have very strange dreams of that time,” he said.

“Especially about the impotence and the frustration of never making it, of seeing Mr. [Helmut] Marko always angry, telling us off. As if we were children.

“This has created a trauma – and I am convinced that Buemi and many others are also going through it.”

The Spaniard revealed that he has been through therapy and still cannot erase this. He said that sometimes he wakes up crying after dreaming of doing a great lap only to get confronted by an angry Marko.

Also Read: $33 Million worth of AlphaTauri driver recalls his childhood friendship with Anthoine Hubert

About the author

Samriddhi Jaiswal

Samriddhi Jaiswal

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Samriddhi Jaiswal is an F1 editor and writer at The SportsRush. She started her career as a business journalist but soon found her calling in lights out here we go! Samriddhi has been a Ferrari fan even when her interaction with F1 was occasional. Her first real experience with the thrilling sport came when Charles Leclerc clinched his iconic victory in Spa and Monza and painted the track red. Now, a Tifosi, Samriddhi is a hardcore fan of the prancing horse and can relate to the chaos within the Italian camp and also admires Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. Off the track, she finds her home in books and musical instruments.

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