Max Verstappen doesn’t believe he will be in the fight for victory in the Italian Grand Prix after struggling with the balance of his car and qualifying in seventh place.
Red Bull looked competitive alongside McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes on Friday, and appeared in the fight for the top positions in qualifying until Q3, when Verstappen ended up seventh ahead of Sergio Perez in eighth. The team’s long run pace had been more encouraging but Verstappen says the feeling inside the car was not comfortable and he’s not confident in his race pace.
“Probably not [in the fight], no, you cannot win when you’re too slow,” Verstappen said. “The long runs, they might look good on paper, but it didn’t really feel like that personally. The problem is that when you don’t have a balanced car, in the race that is quite painful on tires also. So, let’s see.
“I mean, maybe with how the car is at the moment it might be a little bit better for the race. But we’re also starting in the back of, let’s say, the top group. So, we just have to wait and see what happens in front of us. There are a few unknowns with the [tire] graining, actually, as well. We’ll find out tomorrow.”
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Despite his concerns with how the car is feeling, Verstappen was also surprised by how much his performance dropped off in Q3, as he was unable to match lap times he had set earlier in the qualifying session.
“For whatever reason in Q3 I picked up a lot of understeer on both tire sets. This is something that I don’t understand at the moment,” he said. “It was just not drivable anymore — I couldn’t attack any corner. So that’s something that is very weird. I mean, going four tenths slower than we did in Q2 is just not normal. I already had the same problem on the lap before, on the other tire set. So, it was just not working for whatever reason. I think the temperature dropped a little bit.
“The only explanation is that it felt better on a scrubbed tire for me than on a new. But still, the balance difference that I had in Q3 was very weird. I never experienced something like that before.
“It’s just weird that it suddenly happened, because Q1, Q2, it was not like that. On the other hand, our car is extremely tricky to drive from entry to mid-corner. There’s a massive balance shift at the moment. If you fix one thing, it creates another problem. So, you have to be quite careful with that as well.”