Red Bull says that “nothing is working” with its Formula 1 car in Singapore after a disappointing opening day of practice.
While Sergio Perez ended up eighth overall in the more representative second session, Max Verstappen was left languishing down in 15th – more than 1.2 seconds adrift of pacesetter and title rival Lando Norris.
It Is understood that the key problem the team is chasing is a complete lack of grip, which it believes is being caused by neither of its drivers being able to fire up their tyres into the right operating window.
Verstappen’s situation was also not helped by Red Bull trialling out running him on a lower downforce level – which will have had an impact on both general car performance and the energy being put into the tyres.
Speaking after the day’s running, Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko said: “On Max’s car, nothing is working. On both the soft and the hard tyre he doesn’t get any grip and he doesn't have any balance at all.”
Verstappen himself said that the problems Red Bull was encountering were different to 12 months ago when it was more about set-up around the bumps and kerbs.
“We didn’t have the grip that we would have liked on the tyres, so I felt like we were sliding a lot more than usual,” he said. “This caused us particular issues in FP2, which wasn’t really a positive session for us.
“We haven’t so much been struggling with the bumps and the kerbs, but it was more about the general grip of the tyres. We are going to have to go back and analyse the data and see what we can do to optimise the performance with the car and the tyres so we can improve ahead of qualifying."
Perez was equally disconcerted by those difficulties, explaining: "I think it took us a surprise. And yeah, definitely we got some work to do overnight because we are quite far.
"We are nearly a second off the pace, so we need quite a big change to be able to come through. Yeah, we'll see what we are able to do."
Red Bull does not have any immediate answers as to what is going on with its RB20 in Singapore, and the team will be hoping that overnight work on its simulator in Milton Keynes can offer some answers.
Asked if it was a concern, Marko said: “At the moment I would say it is very worrying. For sure we have to try something drastically now. Let’s see what we can try.”
And while Red Bull has long known that its car concept is not ideal for bumpy street tracks, Marko insisted that there was no excuse.
“We can’t accept that,” he said. “We have to sort things out to make sure that we are more competitive. I just watched and we are on the same pace as [Franco] Colapinto.”
