Verstappen’s set-up changes ‘made the car worse’ in qualifying · RaceFans

Max Verstappen regretted the balance changes he made to his Red Bull before qualifying as they left him with an ill-handling car.

The championship leader was out-qualified by his team mate Sergio Perez for the first time in 33 rounds.

Red Bull have been working to improve their car’s balance, which has been poor for several rounds. Team principal Christian Horner said the team’s drivers have found it an improvement compared to the previous race at Monza.

However Verstappen believes he went too far with some of the tweaks made to the RB20 for the qualifying session. Having been three tenths of a second off the pace in final practice, he qualified six tenths off.

“I think some changes that we made going into qualifying, thinking to improve the car, actually made it worse,” he told the official F1 channel.

“From the first lap that I did in qualifying, I was not happy with the car and I just tried to drive around it. But when you’re not confident and comfortable with the car on a street circuit, you cannot push to the limit, and I think basically that’s what happened.

“As soon as it matters, people start risking more. I just didn’t feel comfortable to attack because the car was just very difficult: Jumping a lot, losing contact patch with the Tarmac. So it’s not very nice.”

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Verstappen also made a costly mistake on his flying lap. “Of course, I went off in the last corner, which also didn’t help. So all in all quite disappointing.”

He is concerned the handling imbalance may reappear in the latter stages of tomorrow’s race when his fuel load reduces. “It depends a bit on the compound. Probably in high fuel it all calms down a little bit.

“But at the end of the day, you run the tank down. So at one point it will come back.

“It’s probably just a bit of a shame that we now, in hindsight of course, made those changes going into qualifying but we’re stuck with that.”