Verstappen blames inconsistent car for his struggles in Bahrain qualifying

Having ended up only seventh in qualifying at the Bahrain Grand Prix, reigning champion Max Verstappen has revealed that he had struggled with the inconsistency of his car which led to a tough session for him.

On the back of his masterful performance at last weekend's Japanese Grand Prix, Max Verstappen has endured a tough weekend so far in Bahrain. The Dutchman missed the first session as he handed over his car to Ayumu Iwasa, but he did not look comfortable in his RB21 neither in second nor in third practice.

The reigning champion elected to make a series of changes to the setup of his car for qualifying just as he had done in Japan a week ago. However, while the changes had worked in Suzuka, the setup tweaks did not bring the results he had expected for in Manama.

When quizzed on how tough it had been to get pace out of the RB21 during the session, Verstappen responded: “Yeah, it was tough – tough all weekend, I think.

“For whatever reason I’ve been struggling with the brakes, the feeling also, feeling retardation, so it’s something that we need to investigate. And then general grip, I guess, throughout the lap, [it was] quite inconsistent, and then of course that makes it very hard to understand what you actually need from the car when, for whatever reason, we can’t seem to make the tyres work.

Elaborating on his issues, the Dutchman has revealed that the grip was very poor for him in Manama, and Red Bull have so far failed to nail the setup for the low-grid conditions.

“We did everything we could today but that was the maximum we could get in Qualifying. The whole weekend has been difficult. We struggled with the general balance of the car but also the brakes, with the red flag it was hard to get many clean laps in. My final lap was better, and I tried to extract the most out of it, but it was still not good enough compared to the others.

"There’s been very poor grip and we’ve played around with the setup but none of it really worked for us this weekend. There’s a lot to analyse and debrief to understand what we have tried this weekend and how we can attack next weekend.

"Historically high deg tracks have been good for us but tomorrow will be quite tough and we’re not sure what to expect at the moment. Naturally tomorrow I will do the best I can and we hope we can fight with the teams ahead," noted Verstappen.

Speaking of Red Bull's performance on qualifying day in Bahrain, the Milton Keynes's outfit's team boss Christian Horner echoed Verstappen's words.

"Yuki made some good progress from practice and step by step is finding more pace in the car. He did a good job to make Q3. Max struggled with balance and as he said, was fighting through most of Quali. But, the positive is, both cars made it into Q3. It feels like some time since we have been able to say that.

"We would like to be higher up the grid than P7 and P10 but as is the case this season, it’s close and we have an opportunity to race well from our starting positions tomorrow. However there is still a lot to understand from today, on both sides of the garage, so we will take a look and come back fighting tomorrow."