Oscar Piastri has struggled in both COTA and Mexico City and has been embarrassing in recent weeks.
Even if he didn’t perform as well as he had hoped throughout the first half of the weekend in Sao Paulo, the answer was found. But now he too is a championship contender, suffering an alarming slump, with the blame being directed more at the team than the driver.
Max Verstappen’s struggles in Mexico City were perhaps overshadowed by Piastri’s form and the fact that the Dutchman managed to salvage third place. However, in Brazil, he had a disappointing result in the sprint qualifying, and in the sprint race, he finished 4th and suffered a dramatic Q1 loss, so he could not escape from them.
This is Verstappen’s first Q1 loss at pure pace in his entire F1 career. In the previous six times he has been eliminated in Q1, an impending power unit penalty or grid drop was a factor to consider, but that was not the case at Interlagos on Saturday.
Last year, Verstappen started from 16th on the grid and produced one of his best drives to victory from 17th on the grid, despite Lance Stroll taking the start. At that time, Red Bull were competitive in all conditions, and the timing of the red flag in Q2 was simply unlucky. This time, there are no such silver linings.
“First of all, we need to understand what our problem is. It just wasn’t good,” Verstappen said after qualifying. “We don’t seem to really understand why we’re moving in that direction.
“I just don’t have any grip. I’ve made some changes to the car and it just doesn’t work. I need to figure something out… Nothing seems to work. I’ve made a lot of changes to the car and I just don’t understand.”
“I would like to say that we have similar feelings (about Mexico), but at the moment something just doesn’t turn on in our car.”
It’s shocking to see such a turnaround after Red Bull had been in great form, when they seemed to have overcome the problems that plagued them throughout the middle of the season. It’s no surprise that McLaren are strong, but the clear direction working for Laurent Mequise’s team has since disappeared.
One explanation for the change in pace over the past few months is upgrades.
The difficulties in Mexico City and São Paulo coincided with the introduction of a new floor from Red Bull. As past struggles have shown, it is extremely difficult to continue to develop these cars and add performance, and the introduction of new components is never guaranteed. The latest one may be the root cause.
Despite believing that the new floor would bring improvement if the team could make it work, struggles in the first half of the weekend forced Verstappen to revert to his previous specifications for qualifying, but his performance compared to the rest of the field was still even worse.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Perhaps it will abandon its miserable grid position, make wholesale changes and start from the pit lane on Sunday? It can happen. Rudy Kaleseborg/Getty Images
“Obviously something is wrong. Normally when you change your setup you should feel some sort of reaction, but you don’t, so something is really wrong.”
A key element of Red Bull’s recent form has been understanding how to improve the car over the weekend and adapting the RB21 to changes. Without that, Verstappen and Red Bull would be faced with the familiar scenario of having to make a major set-up gamble to bring the car back to life.
Sitting in 16th place and with no realistic prospect of progressing with the car at its disposal, Red Bull is likely to take the car out of parc fermé and start from the pit lane, allowing the team to once again completely change the set-up and component specifications in search of answers. It would also provide an opportunity for a small penalty to acquire a new power unit, which the team had been trying to avoid but acknowledged over the last three rounds was risky.
It’s a hurray, but Verstappen knows that if things continue like this, his championship hopes will all but disappear.
“Where we start, it’s not going to work. With this kind of performance, I mean, forget it,” he said of his title chances.
Verstappen and Red Bull have nothing to lose by betting overnight as they head to Las Vegas with the championship on the line to begin their final triple-header, but the odds are stacked against them so far at this weekend’s show.
