Albers doubts former Red Bull collaborator: 'You start thinking that then'

It is a well-known fact: when a team does well, the competition is on the doorstep to snatch staff members away. Red Bull Racing did not escape it either. The team of Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, for example, lost Dan Fallows to Aston Martin and Rob Marshall to McLaren in recent years. Christijan Albers wonders if the former is as good as the outside world might think.

Fallows has been with Aston Martin as technical director since mid-2022. Before that, the Briton was head of aerodynamics at Red Bull Racing. With Fallows in charge, Aston Martin flew off the rails last season. Where other teams managed to continue developing their cars, Aston Martin did not. "But then you also start thinking that he did not have such a hugely important role at that team after all, " Albers writes in his column in the Telegraph. "Otherwise the further development of Aston Martin's car would have been better anyway. Now, on the contrary, it went mostly less."

McLaren did improve

At McLaren, just the opposite was the case. That team started the season dramatically, but after a series of radical updates regularly even managed to become Red Bull's main challenger. "That may still have been the influence of technical man James Key, who left in March, but it could also be a consequence of bringing in Rob Marshall. Right, from Red Bull," Albers stated.

The former F1 driver and team boss readily acknowledges that Marshall does not officially start at McLaren until 1 January 2024, having first spent about six months compulsorily at home. "But you're not going to tell me that no talks have been held by then and he obviously has a lot of information in his head. He probably won't have kept all that to himself..."