Verstappen makes no promises: 'It went pretty badly for us'

Max Verstappen secured pole position for the sprint race in Miami, almost against his better judgment. The Red Bull Racing driver talks about where the challenges lie for his team and expresses his expectations for the sprint race.

Verstappen: "I thought: this must be a joke"

Free practice went fine for Red Bull, but later in the day, the RB20 did not perform as expected. "Yes, practise felt really nice. I felt like the car was in a really good window. But then somehow in qualifying, it didn't feel like that anymore and I was really not happy," Verstappen explained to F1TV.

"SQ2, it was just a terrible lap, I had no grip," the championship leader continued. In the third part of sprint qualifying, things didn't go much better for his liking: "And then I went into SQ3 with the soft tyre, and I only saw that I was going two-tenths faster than I had in my dash, and also the lap itself, just sliding around, no grip. They then told me we were a P1. I was like, it must be a joke!"

Asked about his expectations for the sprint race, Verstappen says: "I mean, normally, once the tyres start to stabilise, it should all be a bit more normal. I think, around a track like this, where it's still quite a low grip if the tyres are not in the right window, you can feel either really good or really bad."

"Today we felt pretty bad. But I guess everyone else also didn't get it together in the final run on the soft tyres. But, yes, we'll analyse it. But normally, once we're in race-based conditions, it all stabilises a bit more and it should be a bit better," said the three-time world champion.