Max Verstappen suffered a huge Formula 1 title setback after Red Bull’s risk of changing its car “significantly” between the sprint race and qualifying backfired spectacularly.
Verstappen had complained about the ride quality of his Red Bull on Friday, which he had to live with in a difficult sprint race on Saturday morning.
The world champion finished fifth in that race and fell to 40 points behind current standings leader and sprint winner Lando Norris, and after qualifying 16th, Verstappen said “you can forget about that” when asked about the championship.
Red Bull made a lot of car changes before Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session, using the data from Yuki Tsunoda’s set-up experiments starting the sprint from the pitlane to help.
However, Verstappen said the ride issue had been replaced by too much sliding, and both Red Bull drivers were eliminated in Q1 - Verstappen falling at the first hurdle on pure pace for the first time in his F1 career.
Speaking to Sky Sports F1, Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies admitted “nobody expected something like that” regardless of how tough the weekend had been up to qualifying.
“We’ve been unhappy with the car pretty much since we got here, you heard our struggle through practice and sprint quai and sprint.
“Nonetheless, we were at the point where we could not fight for the win, but we could fight with the group just after.
“It’s fair to say we took some more risks before qualifying to try to see if we could give the car a bit of pace and it obviously went in the opposite direction.
“That’s where we are now, it’s sometimes the price you pay when you take risks, can’t always go your way. It’s painful but something we can learn from and improve."
This is not the first time Red Bull has talked about taking “risks” in-weekend under Mekies’ leadership. He assumed control of the team when Christian Horner was unexpectedly ousted in July, and has been credited with changing the way Red Bull has approached running its weekends and the set-up of its car for.
This has largely been for the better in terms of finding a better starting point with the car, but that has not been the case in Brazil where, despite recent improvements, Red Bull has been at its least competitive all season.
“We did take some risks, we did change significantly the car because that's the sort of risk you need to take to give yourself a chance to put the car back in a window where it could fight for something bigger than where we were this morning,” said Mekies.
“It went the opposite direction. I would not say it was fine-tuning, it's bold changes.
“We have been bold in our approach for a long time, the way we go racing and sometimes it hurts.”
Worse still, with Norris on pole for the race on Sunday and Verstappen’s lingering title hopes now hanging by a thread, there is no obvious reason for the struggle.
Verstappen was more than seven tenths off the pace in Q1, with that coming quite steadily across the lap. His minimum speed was poor compared to Norris, who topped Q1, in Turns 1, 4 and 12 - all corners in the 100-200km/h range where McLaren is typically strong. Verstappen also bled time through Turn 9, where he needed a little brake compared to Norris and wasn’t quite as sharp on the throttle after.
Two different floors have been tried during the weekend and Verstappen said with the extent of the changes made “normally you would feel some kind of reaction, but it doesn't so yeah, something is just really off”.
That means no immediate direction for how to address it for the race, if for example, a pitlane start for a new set-up was considered worthwhile.
“It was just bad,” Verstappen said. “Couldn’t push at all. The car was all over the place. Sliding around a lot.
“Had to underdrive it a lot, just to not have a moment. That of course doesn’t work for qualifying.”
Verstappen, who won this race from 17th on the grid last year with a stirring drive in heavy rain, did not even want to entertain talk about a possible repeat.
“We first have to analyse what is going on,” said Verstappen. “I don’t understand how it can be this bad.
“There is something more important first to understand at the moment.”
