Red Bull has garnered a reputation for turning miserable Fridays into competitive Saturdays. But at the Hungarian Grand Prix, it failed. And the result is Max Verstappen's worst grid slot of the 2025 Formula 1 season.
Verstappen was eighth in Q3, eclipsing Austria and Bahrain's seventh places as his worst qualifying of the year. And it could have been worse than eighth had Isack Hadjar hooked up his lap in the Racing Bulls.
So what's gone so wrong? Why has the usual Friday-Saturday transformation eluded Red Bull?
"If we knew, we would've changed things and we would've been more competitive, right?" Verstappen said when asked exactly that by The Race.
"That's always the game."
He said the RB21 is lacking grip as there has "not been a single lap or a single corner that I've felt good. The whole weekend so far has just been sliding".
Given the struggles, Verstappen said Red Bull was "happy to be in Q3" because he' had been outside of the top 10 more often this weekend than he had been in it.
"It's been difficult through the whole weekend, no grip, front and rear," Verstappen said.
"And it was the same in qualifying. For me it was not really a shock, I just drove to what I already felt the whole weekend."
It wasn't a shock to Verstappen after practice but it was surprising for the Red Bull to be so far off compared to pre-weekend expectations.
"I never thought that it would be the strongest weekend for us here, but this I think no one expected," he added.
"Already from lap one it just felt off. We threw the car around a lot, and nothing really gave a direction.
"And that of course is the biggest problem. Because normally when you change a lot on the set-up, it will always give you positives or negatives.
"And now it was just, nothing worked. Just going around in circles and nothing gave you any kind of idea of what to do."
On Friday, Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache admitted "nothing is responding as expected" and that doesn't seem to have changed on Saturday, with Verstappen saying "somehow this weekend nothing seems to work".
Bar "a couple of Singapore disasters", it's difficult to remember such a tricky weekend for Red Bull in this era.
A lonely race?
When it was put to him that we've often seen him make impressive comebacks from lowly grid positions, Verstappen replied: "Back in the day, huh?"
The problem for Verstappen is that this isn't a single lap limitation.
There's every chance he'll be able to fight his way past Gabriel Bortoleto's Sauber and the Aston Martin duo just ahead, but his Red Bull has never looked anything close to a match for the McLaren, Ferrari or Mercedes this weekend.
That's why he's got one eye on those behind him as well those in front for the grand prix.
"Maybe a few cars in front of me that I can maybe battle with a little bit. But of course Lewis [Hamilton, from 12th] is still a bit further down the road. I think he shouldn't be there, right? He will come through a bit," Verstappen said.
An 'uncomfortable' lesson
New Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies now has his first taste of a tricky weekend in the role.
"Grip has been an issue, pretty much from the start of free practice," he said.
"We have tried many things across both cars, with both Yuki [Tsunoda] and Max and it is fair to say we have not given our drivers the car they wanted.
"Have we really cracked it? No, but now we have plenty of data to help us figure out what the issues are. If we are to improve we must use days like this constructively, to ultimately be better.
"It's uncomfortable but you can learn from these situations.
"Max made it quite impressively through to Q3, despite our struggles and where he qualified is probably a true picture of where we are this weekend so far.
"We have a lot of work ahead of us to unlock the performance, but we will keep fighting and tomorrow [Sunday] will be a very different set of conditions. We are potentially going to have high temperatures in the race and we will see what we can do."
The Tsunoda positive
Mekies also pointed to one genuine positive: that Yuki Tsunoda has been closer to Verstappen than any other round this season.
He was only 0.163s slower than Verstappen in Q1 but still ended up on the wrong side of the Q1/Q2 cut-off.
That follows directly on from a Spa weekend in which Tsunoda made it into Q3 and earned his best qualifying with Red Bull so far in seventh place, having gained a major mid-season upgrade that brought his RB21 closer to Verstappen's spec.
Tsunoda "definitely" agreed with The Race's assessment he'd followed on from the breakthrough at Spa.
"The car balance itself is not too bad, just the grip level the car is providing is very low, it's not the level we normally feel," Tsunoda said.
"There was a positive from our side of the garage that we are consistently close to Max, some sessions we were ahead. Some things to take as a positive."
Tsunoda felt his own side of the garage had taken a backwards step in final practice with "issues we could have avoided".
He added: "That's something that shouldn't happen, definitely have to improve for the future."
Tsunoda felt there was still more to come, but being so close to Verstappen on pace is "something to be proud of".
He'll start eight places behind him in the grand prix, but with potentially more strategic options than Spa provided, there can be hope this Tsunoda breakthrough amounts to something.
