The Dutch driver’s weekend in Qatar began in the exact opposite way to what the team had hoped for. Max Verstappen struggled with irritating understeer and excessive bouncing that even the post-FP1 changes could not resolve, leaving him only sixth, finishing behind his own teammate as well.
The plan was for Max Verstappen to attack from the very first session. Instead, Red Bull so far has looked worryingly similar to the car from twelve months ago: fragile and immediately dealing with the same early-weekend issues that repeatedly slowed them down during the first half of last year’s sprint events.
The difficulties already emerged in free practice: the RB21 suffered from heavy understeer and became even more difficult to handle due to continuous bouncing around the lap, making the car unpredictable. For this reason, between the single practice session and the start of qualifying, the engineers attempted significant setup adjustments, but none of them delivered the expected improvements.
One of Verstappen’s key requests was to make the front end more precise: already in FP1 it was clear that his RB21 was struggling to rotate properly in the corners. Despite the intervention, the issue was not resolved ahead of the sprint qualifying session, and the car ended up behaving in an even more extreme way.
“It didn’t go well from the first lap onwards, there was a really annoying bouncing effect and very aggressive understeer that then turned into oversteer at high speed. It’s certainly not what you want if you want to go fast,” the Dutch driver explained at the end of qualifying, describing the reasons that slowed him down during the official session.
“At that point you are stuck, and we obviously tried to change a couple of things from the steering wheel, but it never really worked. That made the situation complicated. In qualifying it was clear that things weren’t working well, so it’s something we need to understand. With this balance, tomorrow’s sprint will not be fun. We will try to survive and then change things for qualifying.”
It should be noted that on the medium tyre, Max did not seem too far from his rivals, even though the bouncing through the high-speed corners was already visible. The situation changed dramatically with the soft tyre, where those issues became even more pronounced, as already seen in FP1 and further aggravated by his off-track excursion at Turn 4.
Verstappen had started the lap with marked oversteer in Turn 2, which returned shortly after and forced him off the ideal line and into the gravel. During that moment the car picked up minor damage to the front section of the floor, on the T-Tray area, caused by a heavy bump.
The small damage also revealed an interesting detail: the understeer encountered in Turn 2 was actually linked to an incorrect steering-wheel toggle setting, which simultaneously adjusts several parameters. The error was corrected only for the second attempt. However, aside from this episode, the RB21 simply did not seem capable of finding the right performance, especially in the medium-speed corners of Sector 2 and the fast sweepers, where most of the time loss occurred.
Verstappen even finished behind his teammate Yuki Tsunoda for the first time this season. It is not surprising that the two drivers were searching for very different sensations from the car: the Japanese driver had mainly complained about irritating oversteer rather than front-end issues. It is also important to remember that the two are running different floor specifications, as Verstappen chose to abandon the latest updates after the Brazilian Grand Prix.
“The problem was mainly the soft tyre. I mean, on the medium tyre we were competitive,” Helmut Marko added after qualifying. “We saw behaviour similar to what we saw in FP1, and even with the hard tyre we were competitive. The changes we made obviously didn’t solve our problem with the soft tyre. They worked better on Yuki’s car, as he wanted more rear support, and it turned out to be the magic solution, while Max wanted more front end. Luckily it’s only the sprint, and tomorrow we will have to try to sort out our problems.”
The situation strongly resembles what happened a year ago, when at the start of the Qatar sprint weekend Red Bull was uncompetitive and even struggled to fight with Haas, only to recover the pace that had seemed lost thanks to late Parc Fermé adjustments. Will they manage to repeat that turnaround?
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