Qualifying at the Hungaroring turned out to be a disappointing affair for Red Bull. Ahead of the weekend, team principal Laurent Mekies hoped that the energy-rich circuit near Budapest would suit the RB22 slightly better, but reality proved far more difficult than expected.
Verstappen will start Sunday’s race from fourth on the grid – up two spots from where he qualified due to grid penalties for Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Antonelli – while team-mate Isack Hadjar will line up one row further back in eighth. To make matters worse, Verstappen also spun at the final corner, something he believes summed up the entire session.
“The weekend has been difficult in general, but when instead of the tyres degrading, your car is degrading, then you have a big problem. So that’s what’s happening,” Verstappen said.
Verstappen made that clear over the team radio immediately afterwards. Following his spin, he told the team: “The car is just completely broken aerodynamically, it’s just getting worse and worse. What a joke. What a joke honestly, what a shit weekend.”
“The car became impossible to drive”
Speaking to Dutch media in the paddock, Verstappen explained that the team could see those aerodynamic issues in the data – though he could not yet specify what they were – to the point where the car became “undriveable”.
“The car just kept developing more oversteer and all the problems only got worse. I arrived at the final corner and the car just spun again. At one point, the car simply became impossible to drive,” he said.
After two crashes caused by the rotating rear wing, things went wrong in Hungary due to an aerodynamic problem
Where Verstappen’s previous two crashes were caused by the rotating rear wing, he says the most frustrating aspect is that the issue is different every time: “There’s always something different happening. It’s difficult for me to make sense of it, because I don’t know exactly what the problem was myself.
“But it’s clear that something was wrong again, because they already told me during qualifying that something wasn’t right in the data and that they could see the aerodynamics deteriorating.
“That’s obviously not what you want during qualifying, and by that point you can’t even adjust the front wing anymore. Then the whole car is no longer in the right balance.”
For Verstappen, that made it particularly difficult to get the car into a good operating window over the course of the race weekend in Budapest.
“Well, that’s basically impossible,” the four-time world champion replied when asked by Autosport.
“This weekend has been very difficult and qualifying was just completely hopeless. There was absolutely nothing you could do with it.”
Verstappen says Red Bull is hit by a different problem every weekend – problems that even the team itself does not always understand
Asked whether it leaves him feeling desperate that Red Bull seems to be facing a different problem every weekend, the Dutchman gave perhaps his most telling answer of the day and, by his own admission, he has already moved beyond desperation.
“No, no, desperate? That word doesn’t even exist for me anymore,” he said. “I’m already past that stage. We just let it go and try again tomorrow.”
Earlier this year, after the Japanese Grand Prix, Verstappen said he had already moved beyond “all disappointment”. Now, “desperate” can be added to that list as well.
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– The Autosport.com Team
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