The first track day in Shanghai was brutal for Red Bull. Max Verstappen ended up 1.734 seconds off the pace of pole-sitter George Russell, finishing only eighth, with the issue stemming not from the power unit, but from the RB22 itself, which literally chews through the tires over race pace.
The gap to Russell highlighted a harsh reality for Red Bull during the Shanghai Sprint Qualifying, far exceeding the already modest expectations heading into the weekend. Surprisingly, the main problem affecting both Verstappen and teammate Isack Hadjar (who finished tenth) lies not with the power unit but with the car’s overall handling — a scenario few would have predicted before the season began.
Early warning signs appeared during the morning practice session. The lap times themselves weren’t the biggest issue, but the rapid tire degradation under race conditions was noticeable after just a few laps. Graining on the left-front tire is common for all drivers, but the Red Bulls experienced it far more severely. Both Verstappen and Isack Hadjar saw deep grooves forming in the tire after just a few laps, a situation that worsened progressively. By qualifying, even on a single lap, the list of issues remained troubling.
“The whole day was a disaster,” Max Verstappen commented. “No grip and no rhythm. The biggest problems are the lack of traction and balance; we lose a lot of time in the corners, which triggers other small issues. But the main cause is that the car’s behavior in corners is completely off.” It was striking to see the two Red Bulls trailing Pierre Gasly’s Alpine. Even if the team didn’t arrive in Shanghai targeting the podium, the result of the first qualifying session was well below even cautious expectations.
“Setup changes? We’ll take a look,” Max Verstappen added, “but right now I have no idea what we can do.” Isack Hadjar could take some consolation from being close to Verstappen’s pace — not insignificant for a driver in just his second Red Bull race weekend. Yet even for him, things didn’t go entirely to plan. In Q2 on medium tires, Isack Hadjar posted a 1:33.620, just 0.056 seconds behind Verstappen. Switching to softs in Q3, his time worsened by a tenth of a second.
“I can be happy with the lap I did, it was good,” Hadjar said. “I’m not too far from Max, so that’s positive. But I don’t know what happened to our pace — we were half a second slower. We need a bit more of everything to be competitive tomorrow. The gap to McLaren and Ferrari was bigger than last weekend, so we need to figure out why.”
The handling issues effectively masked progress made by Red Bull’s engineers in energy management. “We are learning more and improving week by week,” confirmed Pierre Waché. “We’ve already made progress in energy management based on what we learned in Australia. But our setup for the Sprint Qualifying didn’t work as we hoped, so we need to analyze the performance and understand how we can improve for the Sprint Race and the qualifying sessions.”
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