Verstappen cut race simulations short: We weren’t gaining anything from them
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Max Verstappen did not use all the available time at the end of second practice to prepare for Sunday’s Grand Prix. In his view, Red Bull had more serious problems to address than working out how many laps the tyres would last and how quickly their pace would drop off.
Finding a Friday on which Max Verstappen did not complain about the gearbox would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Red Bull have long struggled to resolve the issue. They were unable to fine-tune the gearbox between first and second practice either. The four-time champion also struggled with the power steering — again in both sessions.
Team principal Laurent Mekies explained exactly what the issue involved on Friday: “It’s about having smooth upshifts or downshifts and what I mean by smooth is, in an ideal world, you would like both the upshifts and the downshifts to not disturb the car balance. So if you go on throttle, you get out of the corner, you don’t want the shifts to disturb the car traction.”
That was also happening during the race simulations. Max Verstappen called time on his running several minutes before the chequered flag, while the others continued. “It was just finding a lot of inconsistency in the long run, and we didn’t feel like it was helpful anymore. We weren’t getting the data we needed. We knew the things that we wanted to be looking at and changing overnight, so we just went straight into that.”
“It wasn’t too bad,” he said of the car’s outright pace. “But we still need to find something. From our side, that has to do with the consistency of the power unit.”
Isack Hadjar finished only ninth, but sounded happier than Verstappen after Friday’s running. “Early positive day on my side. Very consistent. There’s still more performance to be unlocked. But yeah, it felt nice, very consistent on start.”
The Frenchman is having more difficulty with his qualifying laps. “FP1 was pretty good. I was not very happy. I thought there was free lap time in the balance. We went in one direction, and it doesn’t work.”
“So yeah, work in progress. In the end, I feel like tomorrow anyway is going to be raining. But still, you know, I want to go in FP3 and be like, okay, solved something at least. Because, you know, on the long run, seems competitive. This morning was competitive. It’s just that one lap, single pace on the soft. We need to find some easy lap time. So yeah, we know where we are heading,” Hadjar concluded.
