Inside Marko’s ‘cut-throat’ Red Bull operation – including 6am phone calls

Liam Lawson has given insight into Helmut Marko’s notoriously ruthless approach towards raising junior drivers, which has actually received praise from Damon Hill.

The Austrian is well-known for being a hard taskmaster with junior drivers, with his ruthlessly efficient approach sometimes viewed as being excessively harsh.

Damon Hill: Placating drivers is not the real world

Speaking on the F1 Nation podcast, 1996 F1 World Champion spoke after new VCARB driver Liam Lawson revealed the pressure put on him as a 17-year-old junior driver by Marko had been difficult for him to handle.

Lawson is climbing behind the wheel of the VCARB for the final six races of F1 2024, and said he would have to field early morning calls from Marko to raise the pressure on him when he didn’t perform at his best.

“It’s normally a 6am phone call or something like that!” Lawson said.

“And it’ll be, ‘You need to perform better. Next weekend, if you don’t perform better, you’re in trouble’.

“You know you need to basically win races. It’s quite often if you haven’t had a good race, ‘If this continues, you may not have a future with this team’.

“It’s very cutthroat. But, honestly, dealing with that, I’m so thankful to have gone through that with Helmut, honestly.

“Because to now be at this point and going into F1, it’s a huge amount of pressure to step in and, without having that kind of pressure from a young age, I don’t think stepping in this late the season, or stepping in like last year, for example, I don’t think I would have been able to deal with it without having gone through five years of having Helmut.”

Marko’s approach is well-publicised, with some drivers – such as Max Verstappen – responding better to this style of motivation.

Hill said he agrees with how the Red Bull advisor pulls no punches in dealing with young racing drivers and that shielding these juniors from the truth is of no benefit to them.

“I think that there’s something to that. I think there’s something positive about that,” he said.

“There’s a lot of placating and giving people a soft landing, sometimes, from bad results. That’s not the real world. That’s not how life is.

“You have to be alerted – if you’re not on the right track, you have to be alerted to that. It’s much better you get someone saying it early than saying it much too late ‘You didn’t do well enough and I’m sorry, you’re out’ if you thought you were doing okay.”

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Referring back to his days with Williams – also known for being tough on its drivers – Hill said he was steered by Sir Patrick Head in a very similar way to how Marko deals with his juniors.

“When I started with racing, I thought I was doing okay and I got very clear indications from Patrick Head – Frank Williams was a little bit more quiet – I got the indicators clearly when I needed them. And that’s really important,” Hill explained.

“My dad [Graham Hill, two-time F1 World Champion] was very tough. He always said he was very, very hard on himself, and he was hard on others as well. Because I think this is the nature of the business.

“The question is whether or not you do it in a way that crushes someone’s spirit, or whether you give them the motivation.

“It’s always a kind of carrot and a stick operation, the psychology of sport – I challenge you to find a champion in anything who has not been really hard on themselves.

“If they needed a kick up the backside from someone outside, then maybe they probably responded to that or needed that.”

Podcast host Tom Clarkson suggested that Marko represents the stick of Red Bull’s operation, with Christian Horner the more positive and encouraging carrot, to which Hill agreed.

Speaking about the Kiwi driver following his matter-of-fact interview with the pair, Hill said it’s clear that the young VCARB driver is taking the challenge in front of him very seriously.

“There are two ways you can be in terms of sport and talking to people in interviews – you can be trying to express another personality, or you can be a professional racing driver,” he said.

“I felt like he keeps something back. He’s not telling us all about himself. I think he wants to get on with the job. He knows that his life is dedicated to driving and being a professional racing driver.

“I think he shows that he’s serious. I’ve never seen him do anything… because he’s been around the paddock now for a few years just in the background, lurking as poor old Daniel Ricciardo has been looking over his shoulder, and there he was every time he turned around.

“He is business-like, I think he’s not there to mess around. He comes across as a very serious contender, and that’s good. That’s what you want. You want a guy who wants to get on with the job.”

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