Albers gets Verstappen's struggles: "Then you drive a completely different car"

F1 News

17 November 2020 at 18:30
Last update 17 November 2020 at 19:46
  • GPblog.com

Max Verstappen did not have his best weekend in Turkey. The track was very slippery, the RB16 was not optimally steered and the weather conditions didn't work out well for Verstappen this time either. A weekend to quickly forget the Dutchman, and he has already mentioned some issues he had with the car.

Incorrect set-up had a lot of effect

Former F1-driver Christijan Albers elaborates on this in his column at De Telegraaf: "A wing that is misaligned seven degrees on one side, that's really huge. It causes you to have much less balance and you actually drive a completely different car, because the weight on the car changes in all corners."

The result is that this has a lot of effect on how the air flow over the car goes. "It is then no longer neutral, because the car is as it were skewed." Something that turns out to be slower in the rain because of a lower speed, but when it got drier Verstappen got more and more trouble with the car. Because with a dry track "there is more grip, so more speed and then you get more imbalance because of that misalignment."

"This is especially noticeable in the fast bends, because there is more weight on the car on one side than on the other." Solving this problem during a pit stop is difficult, because discovering the cause in itself is a challenge in itself. As a result, Verstappen spun the first time during the Grand Prix, which made his chances of reaching the podium more difficult.