Red Bull boss Christian Horner admitted the team has a “mountain to climb” at the Qatar Grand Prix as Max Verstappen branded his Formula 1 car’s balance “terrible”.
The reigning champions experienced a challenging Sprint race at the Lusail International Circuit as Verstappen collected a single point with a struggle to eighth place.
Verstappen lined up sixth, but he lost out to Lewis Hamilton on the run to Turn 1 and then a wide moment enabled Nico Hulkenberg and Pierre Gasly to storm through.
The Dutchman managed to pass Gasly’s Alpine to rise back into the points places, though he was unable to mount an attack on Hulkenberg’s Haas in the closing laps.
Verstappen, who secured the Drivers’ title last weekend, expressed that his RB20’s handling was so poor that he would’ve been better served competing in a rally race.
“I just had no grip. The balance is terrible. On cold tyres you suffer even more from that. It felt like a rally car,” Verstappen told Viaplay.
“I think I would have been better off competing with my father [Jos] at Spa in a rally – we would have had a better chance of being competitive over there, I think.
“It’s really terrible, it was undriveable.
“We can change a lot of things [before qualifying], but we can’t fix the problem. I don’t know. We will change some things, but I don’t expect miracles.”
Red Bull has a ‘mountain to climb’ in Qatar
Horner has concurred with Verstappen’s view that Red Bull has an uphill task in the break prior to qualifying to unearth the competitiveness needed to match its rivals.
However, he did derive some encouragement from the data the squad acquired from Sergio Perez, who treated the encounter as a test session amid his pit lane start.
“It’s hugely unusual for [Verstappen], Horner said to Sky F1. “You can see we just couldn’t fire up the tyres. By the time the tyres did get going, the front pack had gone.
“We’ve got some work to do. We managed to get a bit of data off Checo’s car with the changes we made, taking it out of parc ferme.
“Hopefully that will help this afternoon, but we’ve got a bit of a mountain to climb.
“You can turn things around. I mean, that’s the joy now that the cars come out of parc ferme, that we can change the car.
“I think we know some areas that we can make changes, so let’s see if we’ve got another chance in another couple of hours.”
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