Updates made Red Bull ’dramatically worse’ - Marko

Red Bull is making feverish efforts, and leaving no stone unturned, to recover from the Formula 1 team’s current performance dip.

McLaren raced past the reigning champions at Baku and now holds a 20 point lead in the constructors’ standings that Dr Helmut Marko believes is basically impossible to catch.

"It will be difficult," the team advisor told Bild newspaper. "McLaren has a car that works on every track.

"We have to concentrate on Max (Verstappen) and the drivers’ championship."

Verstappen is still 59 points ahead of Lando Norris in the drivers’ championship, and the team is determined to do everything possible to stay ahead.

For instance, while sister team RB is using a special denim-inspired livery in Singapore this weekend, Red Bull Racing has scrapped its own plan for a special livery - because of the weight of the paint.

Red Bull told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport that the planned Singapore livery would have added a kilo of weight to the car - which Bild newspaper calculated at a mere 0.03 seconds per lap.

Marko says Red Bull is already on the way to putting the performance crisis in the past.

"With this generation of cars, it is such a fine line that one wrong step makes the car dramatically worse," he explained. "That happened to Ferrari, and it’s happened to Aston Martin now. And us.

"But thank God we have recognised the mistake and are on the way to correcting it."

Marko also admits staff losses, including Adrian Newey but also Jonathan Wheatley and others, has had an effect.

To recover from the loss of sporting director Wheatley, Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will now double as ’head of racing’, while other internal promotions will fill the rest of the gaps.

"We must not forget that a few very good employees have left us," Marko said. "Success simply arouses desire, but the truth is that we can only fill every top position in management or engineering once.

"We have to allow people to accept that other teams can offer them a better position with more money. We just have to make sure that the structure stays together," the Austrian added.