Verstappen stunned after poor qualifying 'Never experienced it before'
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- Nicole Mulder
Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing face a conundrum. Initially, the Austrian Formula 1 team thought they were in better shape than they were at Zandvoort, but qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix was Verstappen's worst of the season. Speaking to GPblog and others, Verstappen looks back on Saturday and looks ahead to Sunday's race.
Verstappen left in the dark
Verstappen was still in pretty good shape in Q1 and Q2 on Saturday, but things went wrong in Q3. As Helmut Marko pointed out, "suddenly nothing worked" at Red Bull. "I have no explanation for that," Verstappen told the group of Dutch media present, including GPblog. "It's very strange. I've never experienced that before, that something affected the balance so much. So we have to see how that came about."
He continued: "Q2 felt slightly better. The car is still what it is in terms of balance. We try to correct it as much as possible from corner to corner. And in itself, over that whole lap... Everything we were changing ended up working out pretty well. And in Q3, really just nothing worked at all. I was doing the same things and suddenly the car didn't spin at all."
When asked if starting seventh at the F1 race at Monza is a low point for him, Verstappen replied: "The whole weekend didn't really go (well), in my opinion. Only in Q2 did it go reasonably well. But when you are four-tenths slower in Q3 than in Q2, it obviously looks very bad. That's something we don't understand now how it's possible. We are also too slow overall, but we could have looked better in quali." Verstappen concluded. Red Bull will be working hard overnight to improve their situation before race day at the Temple of Speed.
This article was written in collaboration with Toby Nixon
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