Red Bull’s Fault Line: As Marko Eyes the Exit, How Safe Is Verstappen’s Future?

Under the floodlights of Yas Marina, long after the champagne for Lando Norris’s title had gone flat, another story was quietly gathering force in the Red Bull garage. While mechanics packed away the scarlet-and-blue RB21, Helmut Marko – the gravel‑voiced kingmaker who dragged Red Bull into the Verstappen era – hinted that his own race might be almost run. Within 24 hours, reports from Abu Dhabi to London were calling it: the 82‑year‑old architect of Red Bull’s driver empire is preparing to walk away. On paper it looks simple: an octogenarian advisor weighing up retirement after two decades in the trenches. In reality, Marko’s exit is the latest tremor in a power shift that has turned the once‑monolithic Red Bull machine into a jostling triangle of interests – the Austrian boardroom, Laurent Mekies’ new‑look race team, and the Verstappen camp that Marko helped to build. RacingNews365 and The Telegraph report that Marko will leave at the end of 2025, just as Red Bull’s Honda‑era cushion disappears and the team rolls the dice on its own Red Bull‑Ford power unit for 2026. ESPN adds that his loosely defined role has long unnerved Austria’s bosses, especially after controversial comments and his part in the internal struggle that toppled Christian Horner. For Max Verstappen, this is not just another reshuffle in Milton Keynes’ org chart. Marko is the man who gave him a Toro Rosso seat at 17 when Mercedes wanted a GP2 apprenticeship. He is the ally who stood shoulder‑to‑shoulder with Max and Jos in last year’s civil war, when Horner’s future hung in the balance and Red Bull’s Austrian and Thai shareholders wrestled for control. Verstappen has said it plainly before, in the heat of that saga: if Marko left, it “would not be good” for his own future at the team, even suggesting “Helmut has to stay, for sure,” while Sky Sports and others chronicled the brewing storm. Fast‑forward to this winter, and the tone around Verstappen is more calculating than emotional. Publicly, the three‑time champion now draws his red line not around personalities but performance. As Nico Rosberg told GPToday, Verstappen “wants to keep winning” – as long as Red Bull give him a car to do that, he stays; if the 2026 power unit misses, “everything is open.” It is a hard‑edged echo of what everyone in the paddock already knows: the contracts that say “2028” are only as strong as the lap times. Without Marko, the Verstappen camp loses its most powerful voice inside Red Bull GmbH just as the technical risk spikes. This is why Marko’s departure feels less like a retirement and more like the end of dynastic rule. Motor Sport Magazine has long described Red Bull’s politics as an axis of power – Horner on one side, the Verstappen–Marko bloc on the other, with the late Dietrich Mateschitz as the binding force in the middle. Mateschitz is gone, Horner has been shown the door, and now Marko is on the brink of stepping off the stage. What remains is a team being reshaped in the image of Laurent Mekies and the Austrian executives above him, who want a quieter, more corporate kind of control. Mekies has praised Marko’s role in “turning around things this year” but speaks the language of review, adjustment, sustainability – code, in F1, for a future built without the old warlords. So what happens next? In the short term, little changes for Verstappen: he stays in the car that so nearly delivered a fifth straight crown and trains his sights on McLaren’s orange tide. But the emotional safety net is fraying. If Red Bull’s home‑grown engine stumbles in 2026, Verstappen will have to decide whether to ride out the turbulence with a team no longer shaped by “his” people, or cash in his unrivalled market value at a rival giant. Either way, Helmut Marko’s looming exit means Red Bull’s greatest asset is no longer bolted quite so firmly to the floor. The car can still be fast, the factory can still hum – yet for the first time in years, the most important question in Milton Keynes is not how to beat the stopwatch, but how to convince Max Verstappen that this is still the place to write the rest of his legend.