(Motorsport-Total.com) – The future Red Bull sports director Helmut Marko was on the verge of his breakthrough in the 1972 Formula 1 season: with eighth place at the Monaco Grand Prix for BRM, he had made a name for himself. Ferrari showed interest. But then came the French Grand Prix in Clermont-Ferrand, which changed everything: a kicked-up stone pierced Marko’s visor and seriously injured his left eye.
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“I was in the hospital for three or four weeks. The eye was held together with three stitches. Every blink caused pain,” Marko told the Austrian edition of Die Zeit.
At some point, it dawned on him, “this is not going to work” with his own racing career in motorsport. And so it happened: Marko received a glass prosthesis instead of the left eye and no longer raced. “But okay, life goes on,” he told himself. “I thought it was bad luck. But I was alive.”
Did Helmut Marko ever have doubts?
And that was no matter of course in such incidents in Formula 1 in the 1970s. “Back then, two or three drivers died every year,” Marko explained. Only two years earlier, Marko’s Austrian compatriot and good friend Jochen Rindt had died in Monza.
When asked if he ever had doubts in view of such tragedies, Marko answered: “We didn’t think like that. Jochen had immense bad luck. I got away – so I was very lucky.”
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The era of Helmut Marko at Red Bull
The danger was a constant companion in motorsport in the 1970s. “I remember races at the Nürburgring, where I tidied up my room in the morning so that everything was in order if I didn’t come home in the evening,” Marko said.
This possibility existed – given incredibly powerful vehicles and rudimentary safety precautions by today’s standards. As a driver, however, you blocked out this danger. Marko: “You still tell yourself that you have everything under control.”
Helmut Marko’s second career: Hotels and motorsport
Marko also had one – especially in his second career after his racing career: the PhD lawyer entered the hotel business in his hometown Graz and initially worked as a team owner and later as a consultant again in motorsport. (Photo series: Helmut Marko’s career in the Red Bull group)
For Red Bull, Marko was responsible, among other things, for the junior program – and helped drivers like Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen to their breakthrough. Both won the Formula 1 Drivers’ World Championship four times each with Red Bull.
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