Red Bull must fix car problems “quickly” after poor Monza qualifying

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says his team must urgently find answers to their surprisingly poor performance in qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix.

Max Verstappen, who started the first seven races of the season from pole position, was out-qualified by both McLarens, Ferraris and Mercedes. His quickest lap time in Q3 was 0.36 seconds slower than his best in Q2.

Horner admitted Red Bull “simply don’t understand” the problems they have encountered this weekend. “We did a 19.6 on scrubbed and then couldn’t, on two sets of new tyres, better a 20.0.”

The performance marked a new low for the team following a series of races in which Verstappen has complained of deterioration in his car’s handling.

“The balance just isn’t there for him,” Horner told Sky. “You can hear from his comments that it’s something that fundamentally is happening that we’re not on top of at the moment.

“So we need to obviously understand it and understand why on the older tyre we were able to do that time and with two sets of new tyres we couldn’t get anywhere near it.”

“Q2 didn’t look too bad,” Horner added. “There was still the handling characteristics that Max has been talking about.

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“But then Q3, there’s something amiss that the others can all improve on new tyres, but we were miles away. So we need to understand that and understand it quickly.”

Red Bull’s efforts to cure their problems at the previous round by removing a recent upgrade did not immediately improve the car, Horner admitted.

“We’re looking at everything. We ran the older spec last weekend to see if that redressed any of the issues at all and the reality was we still had the same handling characteristics and issues with that beginning of the spec of the year. So that’s given an awful lot of data for the guys, but a lot to get our head around. And we need to address it quickly.”

The team is at risk of losing their lead in the constructors’ championship to McLaren tomorrow if their cars do not finish higher than they have qualified.

“We can see the McLarens have made a significant step over the last few races and we are now behind Ferrari and Mercedes here as well,” he said. “So there’s a lot to do.

“Obviously points are tomorrow but starting seventh and eighth, that’s going to be tough.”

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