Max Verstappen concerned by dramatic Red Bull performance drop off

Red Bull

Verstappen concerned by dramatic Red Bull performance drop off

The Dutch driver was 1.4s behind Lewis Hamilton in Hungarian GP qualifying

Ian Parkes

Saturday 18 July 2020 19:13 Updated: 19:24

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Max Verstappen is hoping this Hungarian Grand Prix weekend proves to be Red Bull's worst of the Formula 1 season.

On a circuit that was expected to suit the Red Bull, as it has done with the team's cars in previous years, the RB16 has been found wanting, with seemingly no answer as to why.

Verstappen could only qualify seventh, finishing a staggering 1.4secs adrift of polesitter Lewis Hamilton, and three-tenths of a second worse off than his pole position time from a year ago.

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Assessing the car's characteristics, Verstappen said: "We just don't have a good balance throughout the corner - understeer, oversteer, lack of grip, not having a lot of top speed as well, so everything together just makes us slow."

Despite the team making various changes to the car over the past two days, Verstappen added: "If we would have understood it then we would have changed it.

"It is better but clearly something is wrong still. We're still looking into it. I don't think it's the set-up because then I would be blaming my engineer, and that is not the case."

Coming just a week after the team's third and fourth-place finishes in the second race in Austria, the picture appears to be a bleak one for Red Bull.

"It's definitely not looking great," suggested Verstappen. "I hope this is going to be our worst weekend and we hopefully learn a lot from this and we try to rectify it for the upcoming races."

Team-mate Alex Albon has particularly struggled, notably with a lack of grip and balance, leaving him down in 13th on the grid and good friend George Russell even going so far as to suggest he is being made to look like an idiot.

"Just trying to be beyond the limit is pretty difficult on the car, [it is] easy to make mistakes," explained Albon.

"But it is not a fundamental issue, we are not complaining of one thing constantly. It has not been easy and obviously it came as a bit of a surprise.

"The Red Bull Ring was amazing, but we thought that we would suit this track a little bit more, and we haven't."

It leaves Albon hoping for rain during the race to give him any hope of a reasonable result.

"Qualifying was particularly bad," added Albon. "As a general rule, I think we are not too bad in race runs. It won't be easy, obviously. This is a very qualifying-dominated circuit, so it's not like the Red Bull Ring where we can just get through.

"It is going to have to be done on track because even on strategy there are not too many things we can do. It is going to be tough, but we can try and make it work and try and pull off some overtakes.

"Hopefully, we can change up the conditions a bit. want it a bit more wet now because that's going to be where we can make up some positions."

Before you go...

Stroll sets sights on "big points" after qualifying third

Surprised Hamilton - I thought Red Bull had a better package