Should Vettel replace Marko as Red Bull’s young driver boss?

Succession planning trips up many business leaders. Captains of industry, along with politicians and monarchs, naturally see themselves as irreplaceable – and, indeed, regard potential successors as threats to their eternal dominion.

For many years in Formula 1, anyone identified by the media or insiders as “the next Bernie Ecclestone” immediately needed to keep their head down.

Dr Helmut Marko has long occupied a separate-but-related space in the F1 firmament. A contemporary and friend of Jochen Rindt, F1’s only posthumous champion, whom Ecclestone managed, Marko in another life might have played a role in the team Ecclestone and Rindt planned to form when Jochen called time on his driving career.

Marko was a very capable racing driver in his time, having honed his skills as a youth alongside Rindt at the wheel of a VW Beetle they used to thrash around the mountain roads of their native Styria. Though his achievements in F1 were modest, curtailed by indifferent machinery and the eye injury which prompted his retirement in 1972, in sportscars he showed extraordinary bravery and finesse, setting fastest laps in the Targa Florio and winning Le Mans in the quick – but flighty and dangerous – Porsche 917.

Later in life he became friends with Red Bull magnate Dietrich Mateschitz and it’s no surprise that he should end up acting as Red Bull’s principal talent spotter. Data science was in its infancy in Rindt’s time but Marko, armed with a sheaf of telemetry data and his long experience of what it took to make it in motor racing, knew what greatness looked like.

Many aspiring racers enjoyed Red Bull’s backing but not all of them could withstand the full glare of Marko’s expectations. One who could was Sebastian Vettel, now a retired four-time world champion but one who increasingly appears to have time on his hands.

Marko is among those eager to fill it, having told Sky Germany last week that Vettel “would be the ideal successor candidate” when he retires. “I think Sebastian has found himself now,” he said. “He knows what he wants to do in the future and that is first and foremost motor racing.”

At 81, Marko has cut an increasingly embattled figure in the F1 paddock of late; he wore the deaths of his friends Mateschitz and Niki Lauda heavily. There has been rancour, too, during the regime change at Red Bull after its guiding light succumbed to cancer in 2022.

Marko’s role as ‘driver advisor’ encompassed the wearing of many hats; he was Mateschitz’s all-powerful minister without portfolio, a pervading presence which never sat well with the head of the British end of the racing business, Christian Horner. A ceasefire has prevailed since the turmoil at the beginning of last year – largely because Red Bull’s prize asset, Max Verstappen, made it explicitly clear that if Marko went, he would follow as soon as contractually able.

Therefore it is no surprise that Helmut should find the politics, along with the demands of the travel, rather wearing at his age.

Vettel himself is at a different stage of life. Having retired to spend more time with his young family at the end of 2022, aged 35, he quickly found himself in need of other things to do.

He has got involved in many environmental and educational projects but, over the past 18 months or so, gravitated towards motorsport again despite decrying it as an ecological disaster on his way out. Vettel has even got over his long-standing aversion to Saudi Arabia and all its works, recently committing support to a programme encouraging young women to get involved in karting there.

Although a mooted return to the cockpit at Le Mans never came about, Vettel has been acquiring a number of historic cars including an ex-Nigel Mansell Williams FW14B and a McLaren MP4/8, demonstrating the former on sustainable fuel. While he retired a wealthy man, you can’t spend it and have it – and some of his recent outreach work, particularly the Saudi appearances, suggest he’s now looking to earn.

Vettel slipping into Marko’s position would certainly work for Horner, who still enjoys a good relationship with the German. But what would a Seb-run Red Bull young-driver programme look like?

Sebastian Vettel prepares to drive Ayrton Senna’s McLaren MP4/8

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Possibly more soft-edged than the present regime. Marko remains infamous for his lack of patience with inadequacy, as evinced by the casualty list of young drivers – long enough for those who reached F1, longer still for those who never made it that far.

Tales are rife of drivers winning a race, only for Marko to take them aside in the aftermath, produce the data, and point to a particular corner where they made a blunder which cost lap time. Vettel the beekeeper and saviour of trees might be inclined to be more touchy-feely.

But not that much. Because he too knows what greatness looks like and how success has to be earned. At an appearance at the Autosport Awards many years ago, rather the worse for wear on the free drink, it must be said, Vettel performed what amounted to a comedy turn on stage doing pitch-perfect impressions of Marko and then-FIA president Jean Todt.

He also regaled attendees with an anecdote of coming third in a race, only for Marko to put him in the proverbial headlock afterwards and tell him he would have won had he not made a mess of qualifying. The actual words used were more of the Anglo-Saxon variety.

“He was never shy of giving me shit,” said Vettel, “and probably never will be.”

If Vettel wants to find the next Max Verstappen, or even the next Sebastian Vettel, this is the kind of up-or-out perfectionism he will have to embody.