Max Verstappen admitted “something has been going wrong” with his Red Bull car as the Formula 1 season has unfolded, after being decisively beaten by Lando Norris in the Dutch Grand Prix.
Norris took pole position by over 0.35s on Saturday, and despite losing the lead to Verstappen at the start of the race he overtook the Red Bull and went on to win by more than 22 seconds. Having won seven of the first 10 races, Verstappen hasn’t won in the last five, and says the RB20 has become increasingly challenging to drive.
“The whole weekend has been the same,” Verstappen said. “I had pretty much the same balance from FP1 all the way to the race. I mean, the limitations are the same. So it’s just very hard to solve at the moment.
“It just seems like we are too slow, but also quite bad on [tire] deg at the moment. That’s a bit weird because I think the last few years, normally we’ve been quite good on that. So something has been going wrong lately with the car that we need to understand and we need to quickly try to improve.
“It’s just not a connected balance, front or rear. It wasn’t there in the first few races. But something in the car has made it more difficult to drive and it’s very hard to pinpoint where that is coming from at the moment. That is then hurting our one-lap performance, but also our long runs.”
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Norris secured the fastest lap on the final lap of the race to cut Verstappen’s lead by eight points, but with a 70-point advantage still in hand the Dutchman says he isn’t worrying too much yet.
“I think this weekend was just a bad weekend in general. So we need to understand that,” he said. “But the last few races, they haven’t really been fantastic. So that, I think in a sense, was already a bit alarming. But we know that we don’t need to panic. We are just trying to improve the situation, and that’s what we are working on, but F1 is very complicated.”