Max Verstappen Brazilian Grand Prix Red Bull car problems, Digi Mart USA News: Given that a flying Max Verstappen suddenly struggled with “an extreme amount of oversteer” after switching to slicks, did Red Bull car problems cost him the win at Formula 1’s Brazilian Grand Prix?
Verstappen was baffled after the race as to why his RB22 felt so different from his charging opening laps, when he cut through the field from 21st on the grid to the top five in fewer than 15 laps. “It was a challenging race,” Verstappen said straight after the finish.
“The first few laps were very important. I overtook a lot of cars, and actually that first stint on the Inters was really, really strong.”
“Unfortunately, after that, I don’t know if we picked up some kind of damage because the car felt like the complete opposite to anything that I felt the whole weekend, with some really weird balance,” he said. “Once I got into P2, I couldn’t really make any inroads.
So, we have to understand what went wrong there.”
Verstappen said he lost time during his soft tyre stints, and in his final intermediate stint he continued to fall further from Norris. He described “an extreme amount of oversteer in the car in the high-speed corners, which made it super difficult to drive.” “So, we need to understand if something broke on the car, some kind of aero loss or whatever, because this was not normal,” he said.
“I sit here, of course, very happy with second, but at the same time, I know there was more in it if the car had been in good shape.”
The issue was not limited to the soft tyres. “Even when I switched back to the inter tyres at the end, the car was night and day different to my first stint, which shows that there is something wrong,” Verstappen added.
Red Bull has suffered from car degradation this year, with Verstappen detecting issues that the team had not identified earlier in the season.
Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies had no answer to Verstappen’s concerns after the race, but he was not convinced Verstappen had the pace to beat the upgraded McLaren regardless. “I also think that even if you start P2 say, I think on pace Lando was anyway a bit faster than us,” Mekies said.
“It’s a different story if you start P2 because you have all the first opening laps, risk-taking on which Max is unbelievable. But I think they were a bit faster than us today.
Is it degradations? Is it pure pace?
Obviously, [McLaren] brought another fair bit of upgrade this weekend again. Or is it something else?”
Mekies added: “You may have heard Max being fairly vocal with the car balance once we had switched to dry tyres. From that point onwards, he has been very, very unhappy with car balance, including when we came back to the inters at the very end.
So we’ll need to analyse what happens there, how much of that is time loss, and whether or not that would have been enough to fight with McLaren.”
Verstappen was marginally quicker, by half a tenth on average, than Norris in that first intermediate stint. Norris was then quicker on the first soft tyre stint, though not by a large margin, averaging only a tenth faster.
Jon Noble, speaking on The Race F1 Podcast, said Verstappen would have struggled to win from the back. “I think it would have been too difficult from the back,” Noble said.
“If Max had started at the front with all the uncertainty of the weather and the way those cars are playing out, I think he could have won it. But I think, ultimately, the McLaren in those conditions as a whole across the race was probably quicker.”
Noble noted that other drivers also reported unusual car behavior. “Kimi Antonelli talked about a kind of weirdness with the car and it doing strange stuff.
George Russell complained of the same thing. Lewis Hamilton obviously had the rears overheating,” he said.
“I think what happened was the inters were behaving in a slightly unusual way with set-up, which was masking a lot of things. Drivers were just confused about what was happening.”
Noble also said the regulations leave teams little room for gains, so small component problems can have large effects. “Anything that’s not perfect is going to affect the airflow, which is going to affect the downforce, which is going to affect the balance,” he said.
“It could be a damaged part, could be something mechanical, could be something happened to that car, just affects the airflow a tiny amount… But there’s nothing obvious on the data because it’s come from the smallest of components.”
Whether a car problem cost Verstappen the win remains unresolved. Red Bull has said it needs to analyze the data to determine what went wrong and how much time was lost.
