Max Verstappen said his Red Bull RB20 behaved in a “very weird” way after an incident early in qualifying at Silverstone left him with damage for the rest of the session. Verstappen went off at Copse in a brief rain shower in Q1. While he kept out of the barrier and was able to drive out of the gravel, he broke some parts of the floor.
Having been 11th in that session, he was then sixth in Q2 and fourth in Q3, having lost some performance.
“I think I got very unlucky,” he said. “I came quite late out of the box in Q1, and we didn’t expect it to rain during qualifying in Q1, and as soon as I went into Turn 6/7, knowing that people in front of me, they were already like 8-9 seconds ahead, it started to rain.
“So when I arrived to Copse it was like a little downpour, and I already slowed down, but just lost the car on the rain. So, yeah, big moment. I’m happy that I even kept it out of the wall, because it could have ended, of course, a lot worse.”
Verstappen: Pole Position was possible
The team did its best to repair the car during the session, but the car was far from optimum, and Verstappen had to try to compensate.
“I had a lot of damage to the floor,” he said. “A lot of bits were missing. The team tried to tape a few things together, but some bits were gone. So you can’t really replace that or glue that back on. So we tried to then minimise the damage, just a lot of damage under the floor.
“The car was very weird in some places, so I had to change a lot of stuff on the wheel to try and drive around the downforce losses that we had. But I think we did well. I mean, honestly, with the problems that we had, the damage that we had to be P4 is still a very good result.”
Verstappen admitted that it was hard to judge how good the car would have been in qualifying as the team made so many changes through the practice sessions.
“It’s difficult to say,” he noted. “I think we kept on changing things on the car. And honestly, I think we did go in the right direction for qualifying. But of course, when your floor then immediately gets damaged, yeah, it’s very tricky to answer everything if it’s all correct.
“Most importantly, now it’s just that we put a new floor on, and we get the balance back. Because I think with a normal balance, then it would have looked, of course, a lot better.”
Asked if he could have got pole, he added: “I think so. If you look at the damage on the floor, I do think that we had a good shot at it.”
