At the Austrian Grand Prix held at the Red Bull Ring this weekend, a series of missteps from Red Bull Racing severely hampered three-time world champion Max Verstappen’s run, leading to a disappointing fifth-place finish. To make matters worse, Verstappen described his RB20 as “simply undriveable.”
Verstappen, who initially looked likely to win, was figuratively stalled when a crucially slow second pit stop hampered his efforts at the front of the field. The mistake put him in direct competition with McLaren’s Lando Norris. The thrilling on-track battle culminated in a collision on lap 64 at Turn 3, with both drivers suffering punctures. Norris eventually retired from the race and Verstappen lost his strong lead. Mercedes’ George Russell seized the opportunity to take an unexpected victory.
Verstappen expressed his dissatisfaction with his team’s performance this Sunday and repeatedly expressed his displeasure with the team’s strategy and implementation.
“The first stint was quite good, but at the end I had quite a lot of traffic – which we could have easily avoided because I wasted free lap time. We basically did a lot of things wrong today. It started with the strategy, then the pit stops were a disaster.”
“First it started with the strategy, then the pit stops were a disaster,” he complained. The racing driver criticised the team’s timing of his pit stop, which led to him navigating through traffic and unnecessarily losing valuable time. “The first one was already bad, the second one was an even bigger disaster. And then of course you give away free lap time. You give away seconds, six seconds in those two pit stops,” Verstappen added.
The frustration didn’t end with the pit stops. Verstappen spoke of a change in his car’s behaviour from an “OK balance in the first stint” to “undriveable behaviour” afterward, which he found confusing and suggested underlying problems.
“Suddenly the balance of the car changed in the first stint to simply undrivable behaviour after that, which normally indicates that something was wrong here too,” he explained.
Despite the challenges, Verstappen insisted that victory would have been within reach without the many mistakes. “But even with that, we should have won today if we hadn’t made so many mistakes during the pit stops.”
Looking back on the day’s overall performance, he was clearly critical:
“We did everything wrong that we could do wrong. Yes, because today was just terrible. Everything was wrong. I complain about the tires, we didn’t pit, I got stuck in traffic, the pit stops were poorly executed. So everything just went wrong,” concluded Verstappen.
