Max Verstappen Unhappy With ‘a Number of Things’ as Red Bull Plans Brazil Qualifying Fixes

Red Bull Racing will give Max Verstappen a reworked car for Saturday’s qualifying at Interlagos after the four-time world champion spent Friday fighting his RB22 at the Sao Paulo GP. He finished third in both FP1 and FP2, but he struggled with his downshifts, and steering that kept getting heavier left him far from happy.

Red Bull’s head of race strategy, Hannah Schmitz, said Friday the team would hand him “a different wheel for the rest of the weekend” and was “looking into quite a few changes on Max’s side.”

She didn’t play down how many complaints he’d made. “There are a number of things that he was unhappy with,” she said, but she insisted the team has identified all of them and can fix each one.

The timing of this push from Red Bull matters. Verstappen won the Mexico City Grand Prix last Sunday, the same race where Kimi Antonelli was crowned Formula 1’s youngest-ever world champion.

With the title settled, Verstappen is racing for wins to help the team retain third in the Constructors’, and Friday’s lap times suggest the speed is there if Red Bull can sort the car out.

Downshifts, Heavy Steering and an Early Friday Exit for Max Verstappen

The downshift complaint is nothing new. It’s become a regular feature of Verstappen’s radio this season, and FP1 brought another blunt message: “Unacceptable man. Unacceptable, these downshifts.”

Tom Hart, once again standing in for Gianpiero Lambiase as his race engineer, explained that the system adapts to the driver and that there’s no switch he can use to change it himself. This brought out another one of Verstappen’s classic sarcastic remarks over the team radio.

The Dutchman said he should probably just sing to the clutch: “Oh Clutch! I’m switching. You’ll be punished otherwise.”

Then after some time, the steering started to fight back. The wheel got heavier as the session went on, making it harder to turn into corners, and Verstappen called it a “workout.”

He ended FP2 slightly early because of it, pitting with just over six minutes left. Schmitz also pointed to messy long-run data. “We weren’t getting the data we needed,” so the team skipped straight ahead to its overnight changes.

Still, the raw pace is encouraging. Lando Norris, George Russell and Verstappen were separated by only 0.020 seconds in P2 to P4 in FP2. Schmitz said, “there is a lot of performance to gain.”

Rain Could Throw Red Bull’s Plans Into Chaos

Whatever Red Bull fixes overnight may count for little if the weather turns come qualifying. Schmitz warned of “a very heavy rain front” on Saturday afternoon, though some forecasts suggest the rain could arrive just after qualifying, leaving a chance of a dry session.

Verstappen sounded calmer than his radio messages. “Nothing shocking, but we do want to be a little bit better,” he said on his official website, adding that Red Bull’s gains will have to come from the consistency of the power unit.

The other side of the garage has its own problems. Teammate Isack Hadjar was over a second off Antonelli’s benchmark, though he said the team knows where it’s heading.

Verstappen has said he raises these issues so the team keeps “looking into details to try and find more lap time.” On Friday night, it got a long list of details to work through. Saturday will show whether Red Bull can turn that list into a lap good enough for the front row.

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