Red Bull chief advisor Helmut Marko takes savage dig at 6x race winner after F1 Japanese GP qualifying

Red Bull chief advisor Helmut Marko took a savage dig at six-time race winner Sergio Perez after the Mexican produced an impressive qualifying performance. The Austrian claimed that he had to strain his memory to remember the last time Perez had such an impressive qualifying performance.

Qualifying has not been the strongest suit for Sergio Perez during his career. As a Red Bull driver, however, this has been exacerbated because the driver is unable to keep up with a talent like Max Verstappen and hence it gets magnified even more. Perez has continued to struggle with the hard-to-tame Adrian Newey creations and that has reflected more and more in qualifying.

The 2024 F1 Japanese GP qualifying was a bit different, as the Mexican nailed his final qualifying lap and was within a tenth of Max Verstappen. As a result, he would be starting the race on the front row for the first time since the 2023 F1 Miami GP.

Talking to the media after Red Bull secured a front row lockout, Helmut Marko took a dig at Sergio Perez as he said that he had to think hard to remember the last time the Mexican was in the front row. He told ORF:

"The most important thing this weekend is that the updates work well right away and that we did a good job of fine-tuning the setup. That means that we are now in first and second place. It’s been a long time since Perez was on that front row, I have to dig into my memory for that."

He added:

“I think Perez was better than expected, especially after his bad weekend here last year. He’s gotten better since then. Right here at this circuit, which is a real driver’s circuit after all, the corners of Sector 1 are among the fastest corners and in them Perez was able to keep up with Max very well.”

Red Bull chief happy that Charles Leclerc will start the race further back

Looking ahead to the race, Helmut Marko was happy that Charles Leclerc was starting the race further back in P8. The Ferrari driver has struggled in qualifying and has found it hard to explain what went wrong. In the long runs, however, Leclerc looked impressive and was looked at as a threat by the Red Bull chief advisor.

Exclaiming he was happy that Leclerc was far behind, Marko said:

“Leclerc is relatively further back. Thank God, because in the [Friday] long runs, he was the fastest. So I think the race is going to be a battle between McLaren, Ferrari and ourselves.”

It will be interesting to see if Ferrari can be a challenge to Red Bull. Carlos Sainz starts the race in P4 and should have an opportunity to attack Max Verstappen if the car is competitive enough.