Marko Pokes Fun At McLaren’s ‘Papaya Rules’

Dr Helmut Marko poked fun at McLaren’s so-called ‘Papaya Rules’, after Max Verstappen beat the two faster orange-coloured cars at Suzuka on both Saturday and Sunday.

McLaren is receiving plenty of criticism after Red Bull’s Verstappen closed the championship gap to Lando Norris to a single point.

One criticism is the risk-averse race strategy, while another is that the Woking-based team turned down Oscar Piastri’s request to be moved ahead of Norris to attack Verstappen.

“I just said what I felt in the car,” Piastri commented afterwards, “and yeah – that’s how we want to go racing.”

When asked what he thought of McLaren opting against an ‘undercut’ pit strategy, as well as the team pitting both Norris and Piastri on the same lap, Red Bull advisor Marko smiled: “The strategy they choose is up to them.

“It looked like Piastri was the faster driver,” he added. “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,” Marko, 81, laughed.

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella defended the decision to leave Piastri behind Norris. “Oscar was barely faster,” said the Italian. “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, says Red Bull would have prioritised charging for the victory. “We would have swapped,” said the Austrian. “But McLaren has the Papaya Rules, and they are their own rules.”

So while Christian Horner admits that the performance issues with Verstappen’s teammates makes winning the constructors’ championship difficult, the Red Bull team boss insists the priority is the drivers’ crown.

“I think the difficulty McLaren has 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 thinks McLaren should have been more aggressive with the pit strategy by trying ‘the undercut’.

“It was reasonably powerful here,” he said. “I mean, they could have, should have done it. I’m sure we would have lost out a bit there.”