Helmut Marko feels Sergio Perez might struggle with Red Bull’s 2022 car unlike Max Verstappen

Red Bull special adviser Dr. Helmut Marko believes Sergio Perez might struggle to cope with the team’s 2022 challenger compared to teammate Max Verstappen. The RB17, designed according to new sweeping regulations, is expected to have significantly less downforce than the outgoing generation of cars.

The Austrian was speaking in an interview with ServusTV. Commenting on Red Bull’s potential in the upcoming season and how their drivers might adapt to the new cars, Marko said:

“The car has to be as fast as possible; it doesn’t have to feel comfortable or pleasant. It’s only our second drivers who often have the biggest problems with that.”

Early indications from teams and drivers across the grid suggest that the new cars will more closely resemble the current generation F2 cars in terms of driveability. This means the cars will be less stable at high speeds while being driven on the limit.

Therefore, drivers who can better cope with rear instability or “oversteer” – the tendency of the car to turn more into corners than the driver intends to – are expected to have an advantage in the upcoming season.

Not every driver can, however, cope with an oversteer-y car the same way. While some drivers can adapt their driving style to “drive around the problem”, others often struggle with confidence, and thereby tend to be slower.

As already mentioned by Marko, Max Verstappen’s teammates over the last few years are prime examples of this scenario. Both Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon struggled to match Max Verstappen in terms of pace due to their preference for a more stable car. Max Verstappen, on the other hand, has always tended to choose performance over “driveability”.

Meanwhile, Sergio Perez has been able to better cope with the Red Bull compared to both Gasly and Albon. The Mexican has nevertheless still struggled to match Verstappen’s pace at times during the 2021 season.

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Max Verstappen doesn’t mind if 2022 cars are slower, as long as they enable closer racing

Reigning world champion Max Verstappen says that he doesn’t mind if the new cars are slower than the 2021 cars, as long as they live up to the promise of enabling closer racing. The Dutchman says that if the new cars are easier to follow closely through high speeds, then it would be “worth the change”.

Speaking of his expectations for the new season, during an interview with RN365, Max Verstappen said:

“The cars are a bit slower, but I hope the races will be better, that we can overtake more and that the teams are closer together. Then it doesn’t matter that you are a bit slower.”

The sweeping regulations governing the 2022 cars were originally introduced to fix one of the biggest complaints of the previous generation of cars – lack of organic overtaking.

The high downforce behemoths were some of the fastest cars ever produced in F1 history, but often produced boring races that were mere “processions”. A large section of the F1 community had criticized the FIA and Formula One Management (FOM) for creating “qualifying cars” instead of “racing cars” by going in the wrong direction.