Red Bull might miss Newey’s input, claims Helmut Marko

Having endured a shocking form in Monza qualifying, Red Bull motorsport director Dr Helmut Marko has suggested that the Milton Keynes-based outfit might now miss the input from its former star designer Adrian Newey.

Red Bull have endured a tough qualifying session, with Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez ending up seventh and eighth on the grid for today’s Italian Grand Prix.

The Dutchman looked fairly strong in the first two qualifying segments, but he was unable to replicate his previous lap times when it really mattered.

On Sky Germany, Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko stated that the Austro-British squad has been struggling with its car for a few races, and former star designer Andrian Newey could have offered some assistance.

"Newey is no longer involved in the whole race [operation], that is a factor," he conceded.

"We have a broad base, but perhaps in a situation like this, the routine and the incredible knowledge that he has accumulated over his many years in Formula 1 would help."

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner was left puzzled over his outfit’s performance, insisting that the Milton Keynes-based outfit was unable to extract everything from new tyres.

“We simply don't understand that we did a 1m19.6s on scrubbed tyres and then on two sets of new tyres couldn't do better than 1m20.0s," Horner told Sky Sports F1.

"The balance just isn't there for [Verstappen], so there's something that fundamentally is happening that we're not on top of at the moment. We need to obviously understand it and understand why on the old tyres we are able to do that time, and two sets of new tyres we couldn't get anywhere near it.

"In Q2 it didn't look too bad. I mean, still the handling characteristics that Max has been talking about, but then Q3 there's something amiss. The others can all improve on new tyres, but we were miles away."

Red Bull has recently performed a comparison run at Zandvoort, reverting to an older specification of its RB20 to find out whether the upgrades negatively affected the RB20’s performance. However, Horner insists that the evaluation showed that there are no issues with the modified parts.

"We ran an older specification last weekend to see if that redressed any of the issues at all, and the reality was we still had the same handling characteristics and issues with that specification from the beginning of the year," Horner continued.

"That's given an awful lot of data for the guys, but a lot to get our head around. And we need to address it quickly. We can see the McLarens have made a significant step over the last few races. And we're now behind Ferrari and Mercedes here as well.

"There's something that clearly isn't working on the car, and we're trying to unravel that. First of all, you've got to understand the problem and understand how to address it, and then implement it. There'll be an engineering solution to an engineering problem."