Austria: Max Verstappen – “It’s difficult to find the right balance; we need to work on grip”
Red Bull may have the backing of its home crowd at the Red Bull Ring, but the Austrian Grand Prix weekend has not started as smoothly as the team had hoped. Despite introducing a major upgrade package for its home race, Friday exposed several issues that still need to be resolved before qualifying.
Problems appeared as early as FP1, when Max Verstappen’s RB22 twice went into anti-stall mode, forcing the Dutchman to return to the pits with assistance from the mechanics. During FP2, another drivability issue emerged after Max Verstappen reported a sudden drop in engine revs while exiting Turn 2.
On the timesheets, the four-time World Champion finished fourth in the second practice session, more than half a second behind the fastest Mercedes of Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Isack Hadjar ended the day in seventh place. However, Red Bull’s race pace looked considerably more encouraging, running close to Mercedes during the long-run simulations, suggesting the team could still be firmly in contention on Sunday.
Max Verstappen: “We need to work on grip”
Max Verstappen was far from satisfied when speaking to the media after Friday’s running. Although Red Bull arrived in Austria with one of its biggest upgrade packages of the season, the Dutch driver admitted the new specification has not yet delivered the balance the team was hoping for.
“Today it was quite difficult to find the right balance,” Max Verstappen explained. “We need to work on grip, from the front to the rear, and find the right compromise to increase our speed because it feels like we’re still a bit behind. We’ll see what we can do tomorrow to improve the overall balance.”
Throughout both practice sessions, Max Verstappen struggled with drivability, inconsistent grip levels and tyre degradation, making it difficult to evaluate the true potential of Red Bull’s latest developments.
Isack Hadjar also reports handling problems
Much like his teammate, Isack Hadjar encountered a very specific issue around Turn 3, where sudden drops in engine revs combined with inconsistent traction made the rear of the RB22 particularly unstable.
“It’s as if the rear tyres suddenly grab and lock up, and you completely lose the support from the car. The grip isn’t linear, so you’re constantly trying to guess where it is. Then, once you get back on the throttle, the engine has to recover and you end up with wheelspin on corner exit. It’s really, really poor just in that corner. I don’t know exactly how much time we’re losing, but it feels pretty bad.”
Balance improved, but more work remains
Despite finding a better overall balance during FP2, Isack Hadjar admitted the RB22 is still far from its ideal setup.
“I wasn’t happy with the car in FP1, but I felt much better in FP2. That’s good news, although we’re still not where we want to be. At least the car is much easier to drive now. Hopefully the performance will come more naturally tomorrow, but the setup definitely isn’t where we wanted it to be.”
The drivability issues have also made it difficult for Red Bull’s engineers to fully assess the effectiveness of the team’s extensive upgrade package.
“At the moment it simply feels difficult to extract the maximum from the car because we’re completely out of balance and struggling a lot. There’s still plenty of work to do.”
With a full night of data analysis now ahead of them, Red Bull’s engineers will focus on refining the RB22’s setup and understanding the behaviour of the new components. While Friday exposed several weaknesses, the team’s encouraging long-run pace suggests there is still plenty to play for as qualifying approaches at Spielberg.
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