A disappointed Christian Horner is puzzled after a poor qualifying session for Red Bull Racing in Italy. Max Verstappen will start the race in P7, just ahead of Sergio Perez.
Both Verstappen and Perez struggled with their car’s balance during qualifying. Despite new tyres, Verstappen couldn’t improve his time, leaving Horner baffled.
How Horner reacted to terrible Red Bull qualifying
“We simply don’t understand it that we did a 19.6 on scrubbed [tyres] and then couldn’t on two sets of new tyres better at 20.0. The balance just isn’t there. 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 two sets of new tyres we couldn’t get anywhere near it,” Horner told Sky Sports after the session.
Horner tried to make sense of what went wrong. “Q2 didn’t look too bad, I mean still the handling characteristics that Max has been talking about, but then Q3, there’s something missed that the others can all improve on new tyres but we were miles away, so we need to understand that and understand it quickly,” he added before admitting the team are looking at solutions.
“We’re looking at everything. We ran on the 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 year’s spec. 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. We can see the McLarens have made a significant. Now behind Ferrari and Mercedes here as well.”
Fans might be thinking this is quite unusual for Red Bull.
Horner concluded by saying: “There’ll be an engineering solution to an engineering problem,” he concluded.
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