Furious Verstappen slates "stupid" qualifying with four red-flag delays

Max Verstappen was left berating a "stupid" Azerbaijan qualifying session after a fourth red flag in Q3 cost him a pole opportunity.

Verstappen topped practice one on Friday and had shown strong pace throughout the weekend despite a crash in Saturday morning's final practice session but was unable to unleash his full potential in qualifying due to numerous disruptions.

"It was just a stupid qualifying to be honest but anyway, it is what it is," said Verstappen. "It's still P3. We have a good car.

"I think a good recovery from FP3 of course. I think everything was working out fine but when all this sh*t is all the time happening, I don't care.

"It's just unfortunate but it's a street circuit but these things can happen.

"Like I said, our car is strong so I just hope that tomorrow in the race we can look after our tyres and score good points."

Red flags change championship picture

With Mercedes struggling for pace across all three practice sessions, Verstappen and Red Bull had hoped to capitalise on the problems of their rivals to bank a healthy points advantage in the standings.

The red flags for Yuki Tsunoda's Q3 crash prevented Verstappen from striking back against Lewis Hamilton's initial lap which placed the Mercedes driver P2 on the grid, with Ferrari's Charles Leclerc on pole.

The Dutch driver added: "We are still up there. Of course, I would have liked to start a bit further ahead but it's still all to play for.

"As you can see from qualifying, a lot of things are happening so maybe in the race these things can happen again but let's hope for just a bit of a clean start and we will see from there."

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