Second pole shows Red Bull is “competitive” when we get it right – Verstappen

Max Verstappen says his second pole position of the season shows his Red Bull can be competitive when they get the set-up right on a track that suits it.

Verstappen was two tenths of a second off McLaren’s pace in yesterday’s second practice session. That deficit grew in the hot conditions of final practice but once the track temperatures cooled again Verstappen’s Red Bull was much more competitive.

“I felt immediately more confident when I headed into qualifying,” he said. “We made some minor changes to the car, but they were clearly big enough to feel.

“That’s a bit the story of our car. It can be really hit-and-miss. When we get it right, I think it’s competitive, of course. But when we don’t get it right it’s a lot more difficult.”

He went quickest in Q1 and was only four hundredths of a second off Lando Norris’s fastest time in Q2. After Q3 was disrupted by Norris’s crash, Verstappen did two runs at the end of the session and narrowly beat Piastri in the remaining McLaren to pole position.

“All of qualifying went well,” said Verstappen. “Around here, I think it’s always important to have quite a bit of rhythm, so naturally you do quite a lot of laps. The tyres, luckily, hold on to do that.

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“Of course then the red flag in Q3 is not ideal, but everyone has to deal with that. So we opted for that two-lap strategy, and I’m happy that we did that. It just kept me on top of things, and it felt good.”

Having been half a second off Piastri’s pole-winning time in Bahrain a week ago, Verstappen said the Red Bull is more competitive at Jeddah because the track has “a few more high-speed corners and the Tarmac is completely different, which has a big influence on the tyres as well.”

“When you have tracks where you need a lot of rotation mid-corner, and long-duration corners, which you have in Bahrain, that’s a big problem for us.

“Here, it just seems to be a little bit more competitive. I’m not saying that it’s solved, but at least it gave me an opportunity to push a bit better and deal with the limitations that we have a bit better.”

Running two laps after the red flag at the end of qualifying, when most other drivers only did one, gave him more of an opportunity to get a feel for the track conditions.

“At the end of the day, you just need to try and have a clean lap, try to be on the limit,” he said. “But around here, honestly, it’s super-hard because at some corners you want to try and be super-close to the wall. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

“Braking into [turn] 22 is very bumpy, so you don’t even see where you’re going when you turn in. So it’s very hard to get everything right. But clearly, it was good enough – and of course in Q3 you risk everything a bit more.”

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