A frustrated Max Verstappen told his team “there’s something really wrong” with his car after qualifying sixth for the Canadian Grand Prix.
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Early in the session Verstappen reported “massive lag” and poor straight-line speed, but his chief concern was the car’s balance. He informed race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase: “I can’t get my front tyres in the window, it’s really bad.”
Verstappen ended both Q1 and Q2 behind his team mate Isack Hadjar, and although he edged Hadjar to sixth on the grid by 0.028 seconds, he was more than three tenths slower than pole-sitter George Russell.
Before his final run Verstappen repeated his concerns about the car’s balance, saying to Lambiase: “There’s something fucked. Like this is impossible. It’s impossible. What the fuck’s going on here?” After the session he told the team: “There’s something really wrong that we need to check guys, it’s not possible.”
When asked afterwards why the balance had been so poor Verstappen admitted he did not know. “I don’t know,” he told Sky. “That’s the honest answer. I have no idea what’s going on. Everything is so confusing and the set-up change that we made I also didn’t like. It was very difficult.”
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At the end of the session Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies came on the radio to apologise, saying: “Sorry Max, we know it’s a frustrating one, but we’ll have a look to answer it. It’s a painful but necessary data point and we’ll look into it.”
Mekies explained the team had experimented with different tyre preparation laps on Verstappen’s car, which may have affected performance. “It’s been tricky to get the front tyre to work here over one lap,” he said, “to the extent that we started to do build laps only in qualifying – we had not done that so far in the weekend.
“It was working pretty okay with Isack. It was not really working the way we wanted with Max, so on his last attempt, we decided with him to revert to a push-cool-push.”
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