Helmut Marko has just walked out of Red Bull after two decades running its junior programme, and his parting gift to the FIA is a proper broadside. The FIA says Red Bull builds the best combustion engine on the grid. Marko says that ranking is basically worthless, and he is not wrong to be suspicious of a system that hands out gold stars for only half the job.
A Compliment Marko Refuses to Accept
The FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system, ADUO for short, exists to hand struggling power unit manufacturers extra tokens to catch up. Twice now, across two separate assessment periods, Red Bull’s internal combustion engine has been rated the strongest on the grid, with rivals including championship-leading Mercedes receiving tokens as a result. You would think a team fourth in the constructors’ standings might enjoy a bit of good news for once. Instead, Marko has told Austrian outlet OE24 that the whole exercise is nonsense.
“These regulations are immature and should be changed immediately. The drive consists of a combustion engine, electric, software and battery. Red Bull certainly doesn’t have the best engine there.” – Helmut Marko
His point, stripped of the theatrics, is fair enough on the merits: the ADUO criteria judge only the ICE, which Marko notes accounts for a little over half of what a modern power unit actually produces. Electric deployment, software and battery management make up the rest, and on those fronts Red Bull Powertrains, racing its first in-house unit this year in partnership with Ford, has given nobody reason to think it leads the field.
Red Bull’s Own Numbers Undercut the Complaint
Here is the awkward bit for Marko’s argument. Red Bull already objected when the first round of ADUO results came out, precisely because every rival power unit manufacturer, Mercedes included, got tokens while Red Bull got none. That is not a team crying foul over an unfair system doing them harm. That is a team benefiting from the ranking and still complaining that the ranking is wrong. You can hold both positions if you like, but it does look like having it both ways.
And the reason Marko is so keen to downplay a good grade on the engine report card is obvious enough: Red Bull has not won a single race this season. Max Verstappen has scraped together four podiums from the opening 12 rounds, and the team sits fourth in the constructors’ championship on 186 points, less than half of Mercedes’ 425. Whatever the ICE is doing right, the rest of the package clearly is not translating it into results on Sunday afternoons.
Since Audi, Ferrari and Honda Cashed In
Since the first ADUO period, Audi, Ferrari and Honda have each used one of their two tokens to chase down Red Bull’s advantage, and the second assessment period still came back with Red Bull’s combustion engine rated best of the lot. That is two consecutive periods of the FIA telling Red Bull its engine is the class of the field, and two consecutive periods of Marko insisting that compliment is meaningless. It is worth remembering Verstappen has had his own battles this season away from the engineering arguments, which makes the podium tally look even harder won.
Even the FIA Admits the System Needs Work
Marko is not alone in thinking ADUO has problems, even if his motives are transparently self-serving. Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s single-seater director, has already conceded to Motorsport.com that changes are coming.
“I think our measurement, in my opinion, has proven to be very accurate. With that said, has everything worked fine? No, because obviously people are not happy and so on. Do we need to think about improvements in the future? Yes, I would say so. I think the system is working as it was designed, but I do think there are some weaknesses that we need to address in the future. Also to make it less time-consuming and less controversial, we do need to make some steps to improve it in the future.” – Nikolas Tombazis
That is about as close as a governing body official gets to admitting a system is a mess without actually saying the word mess. It is also a rare moment of agreement between the FIA and a Red Bull figure who spent most of his tenure at loggerheads with the sport’s rulemakers.
A Ranking That Flatters, a Season That Doesn’t
None of this changes the basic reality staring Red Bull in the face heading into the Italian Grand Prix weekend: a team with, by the FIA’s own measure, the best combustion engine on the grid still cannot win a race. Marko can rail against the criteria all he wants, and he may even get the rulebook rewritten eventually. But the more uncomfortable question for whoever inherits his old job is why the electric side, the software and the battery, the other half of the equation Marko so pointedly flagged, are dragging a supposedly class-leading engine down to fourth in the standings. That is not a scoring system problem. That is a Red Bull problem.
