Helmut Marko insists that comments he made following Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix about the Aston Martin were a joke.

Both Marko and Christian Horner had suggested that Aston Martin had copied the 2022 Red Bull, the Austrian telling Sky Sports that there were "three Red Bulls on the podium", a point subsequently repeated by Sergio Perez.

Marko suggested that the similarity was down to Aston Martin's recruitment of Red Bull's former chief aerodynamicist, Dan Fallows, and a number of other employees of the Austrian outfit.

"Obviously they have a good memory," he said. "We had three Red Bulls on the podium, only the third had a different engine!"

Speaking to Motorsport-Total however, Marko insists that his post-race comments were light-hearted and not meant to be taken seriously.

Asked if there was a possibility of Red Bull protesting the AMR23, he replied: "No, by no means, and that shouldn't be an accusation either.

"These are just joking remarks," he added. "If you look at the field, the Aston Martin is the car that is most similar to the Red Bull."

In fact it was Horner whose comments were rather more forthright.

"They say imitation is the biggest form of flattery," he told reporters, "it's good to see the old car going so well."

Asked if he regretted losing Fallows, he replied: "No, because I think we have a wonderful team and everything has to evolve. Nothing stands still.

"It's flattering to see the resemblance of that car to ours," he added, so it was great to see the three of them on the podium."

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Motorsport-fan, 13/03/2023 10:57

"If a rivals product is better than yours, if you can you are going to copy it in some way, if you can employ folks from your rival to show you how to do it, even better. "

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2. Posted by Max Noble, 13/03/2023 9:45

"…paint them all white (the cars, not the engineers…) and with no identifying markings tell them apart from fifty paces… I’m sure every team lead, and engineer up and down the pit lane would fail to correctly guess a few from that distance. Indeed they might well struggle to correctly identify more than their own car…!

Now ten paces, and a few laps around each car, and I’d them to get into the 8/10 category. But at a distance… heck they all look the same! "

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Marko clarifies Aston Martin comment

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