Racing
© Morio
Max Verstappen said Red Bull’s RB22 deteriorated through Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying and left him only sixth on the grid after a late spin, with the four-time world champion blaming a worsening aerodynamic and balance problem that made the car “undriveable.”
Verstappen lost the rear at the final corner on his last Q3 lap, but he said the off was a symptom of a car that had been getting worse across the session rather than a single mistake. “The weekend in general has been difficult, but when instead of the tyres degrading, your car is degrading, then you have a big problem,” the Red Bull driver told reporters. He added that the car “just kept getting worse and worse, lap after lap” and said: “For tomorrow, we need to fix that, because the car is not driveable like this.”
His immediate reaction over team radio was even harsher. Verstappen told race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase that “the car is just completely broken aerodynamically, it's just getting worse and worse. What a joke. What. A. Joke, honestly. What a s**t weekend.” He later said the issue had produced “massive” degradation in qualifying and left the car “completely undriveable.”
The problem, Verstappen said, was most obvious at the last corner. “As you can see in the final corner, I mean, it just turned in, the car is, like, non-existent in the rear. So it's really crazy,” he said. He explained that Red Bull could already see “a loss in aero” in the data, but the bigger difficulty was that the symptoms do not appear to be consistent from one weekend to the next. “I always feel like it's always like a different problem, and that's why it's also harder to actually control.”
That uncertainty has become part of the story around his recent form. This was the third time in the last four rounds that Verstappen has spun or crashed in a competitive session, following a Q3 crash at the Red Bull Ring and a spin in the closing laps of the British Grand Prix.
It also capped a disappointing qualifying for Red Bull at the Hungaroring. Team principal Laurent Mekies had hoped the energy-heavy circuit near Budapest would suit the RB22 better, but Verstappen could manage only sixth while team-mate Isack Hadjar qualified eighth. Verstappen’s own verdict was blunt: qualifying was “completely hopeless” and “there was absolutely nothing you could do with it,” leaving Red Bull with a car problem to solve before Sunday rather than a front-row fight.