The last few weekends have been "alarming", claims Verstappen

Having been unable to win his home race for the first time since the Dutch Grand Prix returned to the F1 schedule, the three-time world champion Max Verstappen insists the last few weekends have been "alarming" for Red Bull.

Max Verstappen had a great start, and was clean and away into the first corner. From there he led the opening few laps, but he couldn’t pull away from Norris as he started to overuse his tyres.

However, the McLaren driver managed to overtake the Dutchman into the Tarzan corner, and he pulled away to win the Dutch Grand Prix by a 23-second gap.

Reflecting on his issues, the reigning champion stated that his RB20 has been struggling from certain limitations that the Milton Keynes-based outfit has not been able to solve.

"The whole weekend has been the same. I mean, I had pretty much the same balance from FP1 all the way to the race. I mean, the limitations are the same. So yeah, it's just very hard to solve at the moment.

"Yeah, it just seems like we are too slow, but also quite bad on deg at the moment. That's a bit weird because I think the last few years normally we've been quite good on that.

"So something has been going wrong lately with the car that we need to understand and we need to, of course, quickly try to improve."

Although Verstappen still enjoys a healthy lead in the Drivers' Standings from Lando Norris, he states the the last few race weekends have been "alarming" for Red Bull.

"I think this weekend was just a bad weekend in general. So we need to understand that. But the last few races already, they haven't really been fantastic.

"So that, I think in a sense, was already a bit alarming. But we know that we don't need to panic. We are just trying to improve the situation. And that's what we are working on. But F1 is very complicated.

Since the end of 2020 there hasn't been a period as long as this one in which the championship runaway leader has been unable to win a race.

"I mean, I've had a lot of good years. I mean, some people have never won a race in their career, you know, so you can also look at it like that. From my side, yeah, we at the moment don't have the fastest car.

"We have some issues that we have to solve and we are working on that. That's the only thing I can say about that. You know, we're very focused on it. There's still a lot of races left, a lot of different kind of tracks. This weekend was just not our best weekend," concluded Verstappen.