Helmut Marko: 'Talent? That's not enough. They need to be desperate.'

“Talent, obviously. But that isn’t enough. I’m looking for guys that really desperately want it. In my day it was sleeping in the car, not arriving to an F3 race in your father’s helicopter. I recall Helmuth Koinigg [Marko’s first protégé, killed in the 1974 American Grand Prix] fighting like hell to do it against parental opposition. They were pharmacists so for them motor racing was something unserious. It was a personal engagement, a personal will to do it. Austria is a small country and support then was minimal, so you had to want it really desperately. So I’m looking for that kind of desire. It’s a different world now but I want drivers who want it very, very much. We have two at Red Bull like that with Ricciardo and Max – ‘I want to be in the car, I want to beat everyone.’ I would say that on the present F1 grid that maybe only half the drivers have this approach.

“But yes he has to be quick and have the car control. We took a Dutch driver [Richard Verschoor] last year, and that was purely from watching him in the support race at Sochi, when he won the race by overtaking on the outside with a completely unexpected manoeuvre. So just this one special move in this case. After that he won the Dutch and Italian F4 championships with us. I talk with the drivers, try to find out how eager they are. Are they smart? Are they aware? There are drivers well progressed on programmes elsewhere and you ask them what’s the weight of your car? Dunno. What’s the power? Don’t know… In the simulator with an engineer all day and I say the name of the engineer and the driver says ‘Who?’ If you are working half a day with the guy and you don’t remember his name….

“When I was helping Gerhard Berger and he was at McLaren alongside Senna, he became paranoid that Senna was getting better equipment and at Suzuka I was timing them through the Esses and Berger was faster there. He very often was on Friday. Then at lunch time Senna came to see me and said, ’Where am I losing against Berger?’ He had this overall picture of what was going on and I think you need this to be a very great driver. Senna would build up this picture then put it all together and everyone would say it was a talent of a different level. But it wasn’t. It was a very high level. But there were others like Berger who had a similar talent, but not the same ability. It’s just an intellectual capacity. A combination of everything. That’s why I try in a personal discussion to find out about what the intellectual capacity is when the helmet is on.

“Another good example is Mark Webber – with whom I now have a good relationship; we shook hands and had a good talk – but he never could overtake properly because he didn’t have the concept in his head. There were days when he could be unbelievably fast. At the Nürburgring Vettel could never get anywhere near him and he won there even with a drive-through. In sector three in Barcelona, there was no way Vettel could compete with him and on fast corners on his day he was just unbelievable, faster than Seb. But he never could put the whole thing together for a championship. Thay stupid crash in Korea. He was ahead of Alonso. But he was bothered that Seb was in front, which didn’t matter.”

Desire, talent, smartness. It was once a good summary of the young Marko making his way in the sport (very much against parental wishes). At the Formula Vee support race to the 1969 German Grand Prix on the Nordschleife, he won by running his only rival – a young Niki Lauda – onto the grass near the end. They are firm friends now, but weren’t on that day. “Yes,” Marko smiles. “Well, Niki took over my BRM drive and then later got the Ferrari drive that I would have had, too. So yes he basically took over my career.” Does he still remind Lauda about that? “Sometimes!”

Talking to Marko it becomes very clear what a debt Austrian motor racing owes his old school buddy Rindt and how much that influence pervades current F1. There would likely have been no Red Bull in F1 without him, maybe no Bernie Ecclestone either. It was a young Mateschitz’s visit to a hillclimb as a casual spectator and his getting a picture signed by Rindt that ignited his passion. “Jochen made everything possible,” says Marko, “the Österreichring, the whole racing movement in the country. He was unstoppable. We were both thrown out of school in Graz because we were too difficult to control and sent to a boarding school. At the summer holidays we were not in the best of moods and said, ‘No we don’t go home, we go to the Nürburgring.’ He had a car because his parents had left him a spice mill and he was the only son. We slept on the grass and woke up to the sounds of F1 engines practising. Jochen said immediately, ‘That’s what I want to do,’ but for me it was like they were from the moon and it seemed impossible and I went on studying. He went on racing after high school with the money he was able to use. My parents said, ‘No way are you getting a penny for racing.’ I finished my studies [in law] and with money I had made from working went to Sweden for two months, bought a Formula Vee, paid my way with prize money and won the championship then sold the car at a profit.”

He was an operator off the track and made very smart deals, as befitting a law graduate. Well educated and socially at ease, even today he’s a patron of the arts and enjoys painting. He was in fact a very cultured tearaway. Did young Marko have the sort of stuff that 2017 Marko looks for in a driver? “The speed was OK but I didn’t pay enough attention to the technical side and I was physically nowhere near doing Monaco on the limit for the whole distance. So I would say I took it too easy on myself. So maybe that’s why I’m so tough on the youngsters; I know what I threw away. There was no data system so no one could see what you were really doing. A very popular reason for retirement at that time was a claimed stuck throttle. Or if you crashed and got out and saw the tyre was now flat you thought, ‘Good, I’ll say it was a puncture’.”

Not that’s he’s a fan of data-logging and telemetry. “No, I think it’s all wrong. The driver should be the factor that makes the difference. You had to find out yourself as a driver where to go quick. But nowadays Verstappen is told Ricciardo is braking five metres later in T1 and Ricciardo is told in T9 Verstappen is a bit slower in, but comes out faster. So they are educated to go to the absolute limit. It starts in the junior categories. Right from the start you have to be smart and hard-working, looking at the data all the time and you have an advantage if you can use it in the right way. In 2-litre Renault we have three drivers. Two of them arrived one hour before qualifying, the other was there much earlier looking at the data and he was the fastest one. But is that really what we want to see? I think it should really be drastically reduced.”

But that’s how racing is now and the Red Bull juniors have to excel at it regardless. One young guy who made a major impression on Marko immediately was a 16-year-old Sebastian Vettel, having his first race as a Red Bull driver in Formula BMW. Marko’s craggy face cracks into a broad grin at the memory. “This kid with a brace and whiskers. He was officially our first driver in the new junior team we’d just established. He’d finished first or second in the first race, I don’t remember. He was driving for this very experienced German team owner but he was saying to him: ‘This is not right, we need to do this better’ etc. That struck me. We almost didn’t sign him because Old Vettel [Sebastian’s father] had signed commitments everywhere! He won 18 of the 20 races that year and was unhappy he hadn’t won the other two. He leaves nothing on the plate. Even now on the plane home he’ll be making notes all the time. It’s a very special approach, leaving nothing to chance. He’s unique in this paddock for that.”