Having chosen the Dutch Grand Prix as the venue to announce his renewed commitment to Red Bull until at least 2030, Max Verstappen endured mixed fortunes on the opening day of Formula 1 track action at Zandvoort.
During practice Verstappen complained of poor gearshift quality – a regular issue with the car this year – low grip and an oversteer balance during the only practice session, in which he finished an unusually lowly 11th quickest, 1.376s off the pacesetting Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli.
That picture changed through set-up changes ahead of sprint qualifying, where he made it through to the final top-10 shootout and qualified sixth, ahead of Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari.
“I guess we out-qualified one [frontrunning] car,” he told F1 TV after the session. “Just a bit tricky to find the grip, the balance. I mean, it was already a step forward from FP1.
“But of course, still lacking a little bit to be a little bit further up the road. It’s something that we need to understand what we can do with the balance for tomorrow. To find a bit more grip, really – a bit of balance, a bit of grip to close the gap [to the frontrunners] a bit.”
In committing to Red Bull for the long haul, Verstappen has lost some of the ability to show his team the proverbial whip, as he has done in the recent past when credible threats of him moving to other teams have hung in the air. Contracts are made to be broken but, unlike Amazon purchases, they do not come with a 30-day returns window.
The nature of Verstappen’s comments and resigned tone of voice suggests he is simply going to get on with it. Red Bull has form in being able to conjure greatly improved set-ups overnight during grand prix weekends – but, unlike in previous years, not quite enough to make the car a genuine contender for race wins.
With the caveat that some performance will have come through track evolution – although it is the same for all competitors – Verstappen found just over seven tenths of a second between FP1 and SQ1 to post a 1m13.585s lap. In that session his stand-in team-mate Liam Lawson went slightly faster with a 1m13.420s.
But as track grip ramped up further in the session, Lawson’s SQ2 time of 1m13.136s wasn’t enough to make the cut for SQ3. Verstappen’s 1m12.745s was good for eighth behind the McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari drivers plus Pierre Gasly’s Alpine.
Despite finding another respectable chunk of time in SQ3 to claim sixth on the sprint grid – 1m12.094s – Verstappen fell 0.527s off George Russell’s pole position as all the frontrunners bar Hamilton improved by a similar margin. Most ominous for Red Bull is the fact that the gap from Russell to Oscar Piasrti’s McLaren in fourth place was just 0.099s.
Antonelli in fifth place was 0.227s off his Mercedes team-mate but was carrying damage from an off-track excursion on his first push lap.
For his part, Lawson was at a loss to explain why he could only find three tenths between SQ1 and SQ2.
“Normally you'd sort of improve through quali,” he said. “And we started SQ1 quite strong. Then we didn't make the same step everybody else did. So, obviously, we'll look into it. There's a lot to learn today.
“But so far, honestly, I feel quite good in the car. I was feeling OK through quali. I thought we'd get through, so it's a shame.”
