Red Bull’s car changes in Saudi Arabia have resulted in a clear step forward, according to Helmut Marko.

Max Verstappen finished Friday practice day in third place, just under three tenths of a second down on the pace set by McLaren’s Lando Norris.

Helmut Marko: Red Bull ‘much closer’ to the McLarens

After the difficulties of the Bahrain GP weekend, Red Bull has brought a car described as “significantly” different to the battle in Jeddah.

While declared update changes include a revised central exit on the engine coke cover and a reduced chord camber on the beam wing, it’s understood that the underside of the RB21 has gone through quite a heavy revision.

The plans for these changes, which do not require declaration to the FIA, stem back to the team’s pre-season plans, with some learnings from last weekend’s race in Sakhir also being applied.

With both cars running the evolved RB21, Verstappen was the closest challenger to McLaren’s superiority as his best time came in 0.280 down on Norris, with the 2024 title rivals split by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri.

“I think that was the best Friday for quite a big while,” Red Bull’s Helmut Marko declared to media including PlanetF1.com immediately after the session.

“We made different setups and, for the qualifying lap, it’s working.

“We are much closer to the McLarens.”

However, while the car over a single lap appears much stronger, Marko admitted there’s still work to do on the longer run pace.

“On the long run, unfortunately, the tyre wear, the tyre temperature, is too high,” he said.

“The game for tomorrow, we have to find more reliability on the tyre wear for the race, but keep the qualifying speed. I think that’s possible.

“The car is still not in the balance which we wanted but we made a step forward, and [McLaren] have a car which is working everywhere, and we have to catch up.

“But I believe, on the single lap, we, for sure, can be near them.”

Red Bull opted against running their cars in a lower engine mode on Friday, instead choosing to run at full chat in a bid to get a firmer grasp on its performance and how best to get the car into a prime operating window.

“We can’t guess all the time. We wanted to have facts,” Marko said, confirming the team had also done the same last week in Bahrain.

The changes made to the car for this weekend, according to the 81-year-old Austrian, are “massive” and together with a “different, new approach” is resulting in “major changes.”

The team didn’t need to make big changes between FP1 and FP2, Marko explained, and while the Jeddah Corniche Circuit itself is playing a factor in Red Bull’s improved performance in that the high-speed nature of the circuit is playing more to its strengths.

“This track suits us far more than it was in Bahrain, but we made a step forward,” Marko said, explaining that the goal is to find more performance with each step of the team’s roll-outs of updates over the next few weeks – more refinement updates are expected at Imola, before a bigger upgrade package at Imola.

“We’ve made a small improvement here, so we hope that the same happens in Miami,” he said, “and at Imola, there’s something slightly bigger. It’s step by step.”

The turnaround, Marko explained, has also come about from the team taking a step back from focusing on simulation data – Christian Horner having recently revealed how the issue of correlation between the wind tunnel and simulation isn’t corresponding with its real world findings.

It’s been a long-standing issue for Red Bull, who rely on a particularly old wind tunnel for its car development, and Marko said experience and knowledge is playing its part in helping the car find improvements.

“Everybody was very open, all the department people,” Marko said of the response after Bahrain, “and they put all the experience into this setup, and we were not relying so much on the numbers from simulation.”

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