Max Verstappen, Red Bull, Singapore, 2023

Verstappen rules out race win admitting Red Bull ‘don’t understand’ car problems

Formula 1

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Championship leader Max Verstappen has ruled out extending his record-breaking run of consecutive race wins in Singapore after he failed to reach Q3 in qualifying.

The Red Bull driver was eliminated from Q2 along with team mate Sergio Perez after the pair struggled with the handling of their RB19s all throughout practice.

Verstappen qualified down 11th, his worst starting position since the second round of the year in Saudi Arabia where he suffered a driveshaft failure. The world champion is currently on a record 10-race winning streak but told media including RaceFans that “you can forget about” him winning an 11th straight grand prix on Sunday.

“I want to win, but when it’s not possible you have to accept that,” Verstappen said. “I don’t want to make it sound too dramatic, but it was of course a very tough weekend and today in qualifying it’s definitely been for a long, long time that in qualifying it has been like this.

“Clearly we just don’t understand that issue. Otherwise you don’t make these kind of changes and it’s worse. So we are clearly not understanding the car this weekend around this track.”

Verstappen and Perez had both struggled with the handling of their RB19s throughout the three practice sessions prior to qualifying. Red Bull made various set-up changes in an effort to improve the balance of the car, but Verstappen says his troubles continued into qualifying.

“FP3 was better, we made some good progress,” he explained. “It was still not where we wanted to be, but it was looking like something.

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“But then we made a few more changes which we thought the set-up would allow but then we got into qualifying and the first big problem I had was that I couldn’t brake late and hard because I would bottom out and would unload the front tyres. On a street circuit that is something which is very crucial, to be confident on the brakes and attack the corners so I couldn’t do that.

“Besides that, also just the low-speed corners where I think we have been struggling already the whole weekend, I just had no rear support. So I just kept on like having mini slides or in my final lap, a big one at turn three. When it’s like that there is no lap time.”

Adding to his problems, Verstappen faces three investigations by the stewards for separate incidents during qualifying. The first was for impeding the Mercedes of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton by stopping at the end of the pit lane at the end of Q1. He picked up the second shortly afterwards when he was one of several drivers who slowed at turns 16 and 17, and appeared to get in Logan Sargeant’s way. In Q2 he attracted the attention of the stewards again by potentially impeding Yuki Tsunoda.

Verstappen insisted stopping at the end of the pit lane at the end of Q1 to build a gap to cars ahead was a normal part of qualifying. “It’s something that we do when the pit lane goes green,” he said.

“The first one normally takes off then the second always waits a bit, takes off then the other guy waits for that guy to have a bit of a gap. And when I started to roll and I saw that there were a lot of cars being so close, I knew what was going to happen in the last chicane, so I was like ‘alright, just stop, wait a bit, just to create less drama.’ Then clearly people behind me were complaining. I just thought that that would be a safer option than all being together.”

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He admitted that he had been caught out by Tsunoda approaching him at turn four early in Q2 which led to the AlphaTauri driver abandoning his lap.

“Yeah, that was not good,” he admitted. “I didn’t see him because I was on the radio talking about what was the problem, and then I didn’t get a call until he was basically behind me. Basically sums up my qualifying, it was just super-hectic and messy.”

Verstappen has won many races from the midfield over the last two seasons but he does not expect he will be able to do the same in Singapore.

“You can’t pass,” he said. “On other tracks you can start last, probably in Spa you can start last and win the race, but not here. Here you need to be two, three seconds faster to have a chance to pass. So, that’s just street circuit stuff.”

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Author information

Will Wood
Will has been a RaceFans contributor since 2012 during which time he has covered F1 test sessions, launch events and interviewed drivers. He mainly...
Claire Cottingham
Claire has worked in motorsport for much of her career, covering a broad mix of championships including Formula One, Formula E, the BTCC, British...

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16 comments on “Verstappen rules out race win admitting Red Bull ‘don’t understand’ car problems”

  1. Fantastic

  2. pizza_pazzo2004
    16th September 2023, 17:27

    GET STUFFED

  3. I’ll only believe it when the race results are posted tomorrow.

    1. Indeed, you can’t pass is wrong, ofc he will pass cars if he’s faster, whether he will pass all remains to be seen.

  4. I’m impressed how their issues remind me of Mercedes in 2015. They were just too slow and hopeless all the time.
    At least this year the field behind is competitive enough that them being slow meant they couldn’t make it even to Q3.

    Mercedes that year was even further down the fastest cars, but the grid was much more spreaded out so they were still able to be 5th an 6th.

    1. Yeah, it seems that if you build a good racing car it won’t work in Singapore. Mercedes back then and RB now suffering the same faith. In a way it’s apparently a compliment. And it provides us with some variation for once. Not sure what all the mud throwing in the comments is about though. Sorry this section became that way.

  5. They don’t understand problems because these problems are outside their control. Record has been beaten, so now FIA together with FOM can make a different winner happen. Add to it the whole Marko controversy (but Saudi Arabia and Petronas sponsoring Hamilton and Mercedes are fine!) and it’s Singapore 2015, just 8 years later. History does indeed repeat itself.

    1. Inclined to agree with you over The Sponsorship of companies that are based in countries with awful human rights , I presume that’s what you ment, not the petroleum side of the argument. But Herr. Marko. is just a very unfortunate addition to the MAX fan club , hard to say what many of us think without the potential of being moderated. I suppose he may have thrown the bottle out of the pram today.

    2. Lol… Haven`t seen that many tangents since A-level Maths…You even managed to shoe horn Hamilton in there….

    3. The tires should be placed in lots, and randomly assigned/picked from a pot, with the crews picking them up right after assignment. The biggest problem with a sole tire supplier is you cannot trust that some teams are getting ‘baked’ tires or not, which would not work in the perceived window/normally.

      It really sounds like Red Bull had extra crispy tires to me, which were sliding over the place and unable to deal with the change in torque/BHP of the motor/drive train. With all the polemics of Bridgestone and MotoGP, and the Japanese manufacturers being preferred, for obvious reasons, there should be safeguards against ‘tampering’.

      1. PCXMAC, I don’t know if they still do it, but it certainly used to be a random allocation. Each Pirelli tyre has a unique bar code baked into the tyre wall. The tyres are supplied to the FIA, and the FIA supplies the correct sets to each driver and logs which bar codes they gave to each driver. The bar code is used to ensure each driver only uses their own allocated tyres, i.e. you can’t use your team mate’s tyres, not even by accident. So it isn’t possbile for Pirelli to give a special bake to certain teams or drivers.

      2. What a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

  6. for some reason, Singapore is the odd ball for the class of the field. same thing happened to Mercedes around this circuit during their domination era.

    1. And ferrari is often unusually competitive here with a car design that is usually better on fast tracks (example 2019 and this year).

  7. If only there were another DRS zone to help overtake.
    Oh.

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