Red Bull may be the reigning World Champions on the Drivers’ side of Formula 1, but Helmut Marko has warned they won’t regain the teams’ title unless they widen their F1 car’s working window.

Although Red Bull won the championship double the last two years, 2022 and 2023, even claiming the 1-2 in last year’s Drivers’ Championship when they won 19 of 22 Grands Prix, this season they’ve come under attack from McLaren and Ferrari.

Helmut Marko expects ‘even tighter’ 2025 championship race

The 2024 championship was an intriguing one for Formula 1, and bodes well for the year to come, as none of the teams except McLaren nailed their in-season updates.

The Woking team faced their own pitfalls in what they didn’t get it spot on over the winter and thus started the season playing catch-up.

When all was said and done after a marathon 24-race championship, Red Bull were the World title holders with Max Verstappen 63 points ahead of Lando Norris while McLaren won the Constructors’ by 13 points ahead of Ferrari. Red Bull were third, 77 points down.

But while much of the blame for that was put on Sergio Perez, the only one of the top-eight drivers without a win on the board, Marko accepts Red Bull need to improve as a whole or risk back-to-back defeats to McLaren.

“If they take this form into next year and we don’t improve, then it will be even tighter than it is today,” the Red Bull motorsport advisor told Sky Deutschland.

“That’s the beauty of the sport.

“It’s not a completely new start because the regulations are stable, but our weaknesses are still that we get to the track and the correlation between all the simulations, the wind tunnel and reality doesn’t work.

“And the car is in a much too narrow window in which it works. Our technical group has a lot of work to do.”

F1 2024: Team-mate head-to-head stats

👉F1 2024: Head-to-head qualifying record between team-mates

👉F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

However, it’s not just the car that could be the problem next season.

This year McLaren had two cars winning Grands Prix and scoring podiums in Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri while next year Ferrari will have Charles Leclerc, who won races in 2024, as well as Lewis Hamilton on the payroll.

As for Mercedes, they are losing Hamilton to Ferrari but their new signing is junior sensation Kimi Antonelli.

Marko concedes that’s a two-car attack from Red Bull’s two biggest rivals but he’s hoping Verstappen’s “clear number one” will at least win the Drivers’ Championship.

“It’s getting closer,” he said.

“McLaren has a stable driver pairing, but at Ferrari it will of course be interesting with Leclerc. Hamilton drove a great race on the medium tyres, but we’ll have to wait and see how it goes at Ferrari. Antonelli in the Mercedes won’t be easy either.

“I see the advantage of having a clear number one in Max.”

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