Red Bull at risk of 'becoming a dictatorship' after Helmut Marko exit bombshell

Former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya believes that the Red Bull F1 team is at risk of ‘becoming a dictatorship’ if the company’s Austrian contingent wants to get more involved with the squad’s management.

Red Bull Racing are braced for a period of change in 2026 as they enter the first year of the new technical regulations. After watching Christian Horner depart in July, long-serving advisor Helmut Marko confirmed his retirement from motorsport days after watching Max Verstappen narrowly miss out on the Drivers’ Championship title.

With Laurent Mekies at the helm, Red Bull has a leader who inspires confidence and has the support of Verstappen. However, with their own power unit project still an unknown and Gianpiero Lambiase’s role for 2025 unclear, the four-time world champion still faces plenty of question marks next season.

According to Montoya, Marko’s departure could trigger an unfortunate shift in the power dynamic. “As well as Christian and Helmut, they lost Jonathan Wheatley to Audi,” the Colombian racer told Grosvenor Casinos. “And Adrian Newey left a year ago.

“From what you hear, Austria wants to get more involved and run the team. That's a double-edged sword. If they get more control of the team, then it becomes a dictatorship running a team. I don’t like using that word, but there’ll be one way of doing things, one direction, under one leadership.

“You need one guy making decisions, whether it's the right one or wrong one. When you start involving big corporations, then all of a sudden, every decision needs a meeting. And everybody has a different opinion, and they start looking at it from the budget point of view and the marketing point of view.”

When Marko spoke out about his Red Bull exit in an interview with De Telegraaf, the 82-year-old expressed that the time had come to stop his travel to 24 Grands Prix per season, and instead enjoy a quiet retirement away from F1.

However, Montoya suspects that another motive may have played a role in the decision. “I think Helmut realised he had no power anymore,” he continued. “He had full control of the drivers. He had full control of the decisions.

“And I think he realised now that anything he wants to do needs to be approved. He got to a point where he said to himself, ‘I’m not going to be anybody's employee.’ It's really hard when you have had autonomy, and then you lose all that. Everybody's going to question everything.”