Verstappen ‘Fed Up’ After Another Rear-Wing Crash

• Max Verstappen crashed out of the British Grand Prix at Stowe corner with four laps remaining, having been running third.
• The Red Bull driver blamed the same rear-wing fault that caused his qualifying crash at the previous race in Austria.
• Team boss Laurent Mekies said Verstappen had every right to be unhappy after two race weekends in a row where the car let him down in high-speed corners.

Max Verstappen spun into the gravel at Silverstone’s Stowe corner with four laps to go in the British Grand Prix, ending a race in which he had been running third and closing in on a podium finish.

The crash triggered a late Safety Car, and the 52-lap race finished under caution behind winner Charles Leclerc. It was the second race weekend in a row in which a mechanical fault had pitched Verstappen off the track, and the four-time champion made no effort to hide his frustration afterward.

Verstappen had been aided earlier in the race by taking his second pit stop under a Virtual Safety Car, a period when the pit-lane time loss is reduced. George Russell had looked likely to pass him for third before a slow puncture dropped the Mercedes driver down the order, while Kimi Antonelli had been closing on Leclerc for the lead when his wheel-guard problem intervened.

Watch every race of the 2026 season live on Apple TV

A Fault He Has Seen Before

Verstappen told Sky Sports F1 that the cause of his Silverstone spin was identical to the issue that put him in the barriers in qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix a week earlier.

“The same as Austria, the rear wing just doesn’t fully close,” he said. “I saw the analysis. It looks like it closes, but it doesn’t. It closes but it’s just a little bit open and you lose a lot of rear downforce. And that’s why the car just spins off the track.”

The 2026 cars run active rear wings that open on the straights for extra speed and close again before braking zones. When Verstappen’s wing failed to close in time approaching Stowe, one of Silverstone’s fastest corners, the sudden loss of rear downforce sent the car into a spin with almost no warning.

He said the repeat fault was harder to accept than a one-off. After two failures in as many weekends, he called the situation “super dangerous,” warning that a driver could “really hurt yourself” if the wing failed again at high speed. “I was lucky in Austria, I was lucky here, but that’s why you get really fed up with it.”

A Podium He Didn’t Want

Before his retirement, Verstappen had only been running third thanks to trouble elsewhere on the grid. George Russell lost time to a slow puncture, Kimi Antonelli suffered a wheel-guard failure while chasing the race lead, and Lewis Hamilton picked up a five-second penalty for a false start.

Verstappen was blunt about what his position actually reflected. “We got lucky, right? Lewis had that five-second penalty. We had a VSC at one point, George had a slow puncture I think, Kimi had a problem, so that’s why you put yourself in that position,” he said.

On the medium compound tyre, Verstappen said the car was “maybe a little bit better,” but a separate balance problem never went away all weekend. He said the car was so poorly balanced “the whole weekend and in the race again, that I can’t push at all,” describing a handling issue that compounded the rear-wing scare.

He added that a top-three finish would not have matched his car’s pace. Any podium, he said, “would have been a podium that we didn’t deserve on pace,” pointing to how little grip the Red Bull found on the hard tyre. Watching Russell and Hamilton race behind him instead of chasing him down was “actually quite entertaining,” he said, admitting his reaction in the mirrors was simply, “thank you!” He summed up the day in four words: “just another painful weekend.”

Red Bull Stands Behind Him

Team principal Laurent Mekies backed his driver’s frustration, calling the situation unpleasant for both the team and Verstappen.

“He’s right not to be happy,” Mekies told reporters. “It is very unpleasant for drivers to be let down by the car in the high-speed corners in two consecutive races, whether it be for two different reasons.”

Mekies said the team felt the failure too. “It is in a much smaller scale also extremely unpleasant for us as a group to send our drivers to the gravel trap, so he’s right to be unhappy,” he said. “I have no doubt that as a team we will put in place what is necessary for that not to happen again.”

The active rear wing is a new feature of the 2026 technical rules, designed to cut drag on the straights across every car on the grid. Red Bull is not the only team to have experienced teething problems with the system this season, though two failures in the same style of high-speed corner across consecutive weekends leave the team with clear questions to answer, and Mekies himself indicated the two failures had separate causes.

A Difficult Weekend for Both Red Bulls

Verstappen’s teammate Isack Hadjar finished fifth, the same position he started, and described a race hit by an unexpected mid-race drop in pace.

“Very good pace the first few laps,” Hadjar said. “I was right within Max’s overtake mode and, I don’t know, it just felt nice. Then we had a huge drop-off. Even on new tyres, on the new hard after the pit stop, I don’t know, just not much pace. I was really lacking load on the car.”

A front wing change partway through the race restored his pace, but by then the damage was done. “Once we changed the front wing and I went out again, we gained a lot of lap time. So I was happy again, but at the same time I was like, ‘okay, I just wasted my whole race,'” Hadjar said, explaining that four or five laps had gone by and he had lost a string of positions. “So, quite frustrating,” he added.

Hadjar said he felt he had extracted what he could from a difficult package once the front wing change was made. “I think I got on top of what the car could do with the new package, which I couldn’t really do at the Red Bull Ring,” he said, referring to the Austrian Grand Prix circuit. “So I’m happy with that,” he added, saying the team must now work out what went wrong in that “no-man’s-land stint” before it can “go and fight further ahead.”

A Season Already Complicated

Verstappen’s retirement adds further strain to a Red Bull relationship already under scrutiny. His camp is understood to have held talks with McLaren about a possible move for 2027, speculation that followed him throughout the British Grand Prix weekend.

Reliability problems arriving in back-to-back races will do little to quiet that speculation. Formula 1’s next round is the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps on July 17 to 19, and Red Bull will want answers on the rear wing long before then.

Spa-Francorchamps includes some of the fastest corners on the calendar, among them Eau Rouge and Raidillon, taken flat out with the same active wing system in play. A repeat of the Silverstone or Austria failure there would carry even greater risk, giving Red Bull’s engineers a firm deadline to understand and fix the fault rather than simply hope it does not resurface.

Want more F1Chronicle.com coverage? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for the best F1 news and analysis on the internet.

Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

More articles by Jack Renn →