Max Verstappen claims Red Bull’s issues can be masked on low fuel runs and describes his pole lap for the Japanese Grand Prix as ‘hoping it would stick’.
Verstappen just sent it and hoped for the best
“I think that issue was a lot better today,” said Verstappen during the post qualifying press conference regarding the “flexing” issue he reported during FP2. “But at the same time, the through corner balance is still what we need to work on.”
“I think on low fuel over one lap, some bits you can mask a little bit. But it’s still not like I go into the lap fully confident and comfortable. So the last lap I was like, ‘well, I’m just going to not try and feel uncomfortable – just send it in and see what we get’.”
It’s very rare, of course, that a lap like that then can stick, but this time it worked well.
– Max Verstappen on ‘risk all, gain all’ approach to Qualifying in Suzuka
Verstappen driving his RB21 to pole at Suzuka
“It’s very rare, of course, that a lap like that then can stick, but this time it worked well. We know that we have some issues that we want to solve, but it’s clearly not easy to solve them at the moment,” said Verstappen of the issues that still hinder Red Bull.
‘Didn’t expect to even be close to pole’
Verstappen, was already happy with the lap time he was able to extract from the RB21, regardless if it meant pole or not.
“I think exit 1 into 2, 6, 7, 8 and then Spoon. Those places I was like, ‘well, I hope it’s going to stick.’ But yeah, it did.”
“And of course when I crossed the line, I could see my name pop up. But I knew Oscar was still behind me, but I was already just very happy with what I did there because I didn’t even expect to be close to that. So yeah, that was a nice moment.”
Describing the RB21 as difficult to drive, Verstappen said the 2022 and 2023 cars were much easier to handle, implying that the responsibility for improving the car lies with the engineers rather than the drivers.
