Max Verstappen said he wasn’t able to find enough time from session to session in qualifying to prevent the Ferrari drivers from pushing him off the front row of the grid.
The Red Bull driver set the pace through all three practice sessions at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. He was quickest again in Q1, then fell to second in Q2 and was relegated to third by the Ferrari pair in the top 10 shoot-out.Verstappen said the unusual characteristics of the Mexico City track, where high altitude leads to a combination of low downforce and hot track temperatures, make it especially difficult to perfect a lap in qualifying.
“I personally just expected it to be a little bit better in the evolution through qualifying from our side and I think that’s what we were lacking a little bit,” he said. “I think Q1 was okay, Q2 wasn’t too bad, but then it just seemed to fall away from us. The improvements were not big enough coming into Q3.
“But this track is also extremely difficult in qualifying to basically hit the perfect lap because it’s so low-grip. If you try to push a little bit more, you might overheat the tyres or you have a little slide and that’s I think what happened to me today.
“I tried to find a little bit more time but then the balance wasn’t exactly there and then you’re sliding, you overheat your tyres, and then in the last sector you have no tyres left. And that’s basically what happened. It’s just this track it’s very, very difficult to put a perfect lap together.”
Neither of the Ferrari drivers were able to improve with their final runs in Q3. Verstappen said his car was sliding its tyres too much from the middle part of the lap to be able to challenge them.
“I still felt quite bad in the middle sector. I was sliding around quite a bit. So again, I tried to get a bit of time back. My first sector wasn’t probably ideal. I improved a bit, but not enough.
“But it’s just feeling and then around here when you slide a bit too much, like I said, it doesn’t come together. When it’s so tight, one or two tenths can be easily found or lost and I think that’s what happened in qualifying.”
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Zann (@zann)
29th October 2023, 13:01
it’s like there were two tyre temperatures that worked: one for the fronts, and one for the rears, each +/- 1 degree!
That’s for the surface, then there’s another different pair of temperatures for the cores, that they have to get through the surface