Dr Helmut Marko couldn't resist a dig at McLaren's so-called 'Papaya rules' after Max Verstappen beat the team's faster orange cars to claim victory at Suzuka across both qualifying and the race.
McLaren has faced a barrage of criticism following the weekend, with Verstappen narrowing the drivers' championship gap to Lando Norris to just 1 point.
Observers have pointed to the team's conservative race strategy and their refusal to grant Oscar Piastri's request to move ahead of Norris to challenge Verstappen. "I just said what I felt in the car," Piastri remarked post-race, "and yeah—that's how we want to go racing."
And when asked about McLaren's decision to forgo an 'undercut' pit strategy and instead pit both Norris and Piastri on the same lap, Red Bull advisor Marko grinned. "The strategy they choose is up to them," he said. "It looked like Piastri was the faster driver. The question is whether he could have overtaken Max, because that's a different story on this circuit. But maybe this is a new version of the Papaya rules," the 81-year-old Austrian laughed.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella defended the call to keep Piastri behind Norris. "Oscar was barely faster," the Italian explained. "So it wouldn't have made any difference. As soon as the gap was within a second, the turbulence from the dirty air was too great. The same would have happened to Oscar."
Marko, however, insisted Red Bull would have taken a different approach. "We would have swapped," the Austrian declared. "But McLaren has the Papaya rules, and they are their own rules."
While Christian Horner conceded that Red Bull's struggles with Verstappen's teammates make the constructors' title a tough prospect, the team boss stressed that the drivers' championship remains the focus. "I think the difficulty McLaren have is that they've made their bed by deciding to let the two drivers compete against each other," he said. "So that's the compromise that decision inevitably entails."
Horner also suggested McLaren missed an opportunity with their pit strategy. "It [the undercut] was reasonably powerful here," he noted. "I mean, they could have, should have done it. I'm sure we would have lost out a bit there."
