Max Verstappen third in Belgium: “No surprise – I’d expected that”

First, the good news: Red Bull Racing put in a solid performance on Friday – we’ve certainly seen very different things from the Milton Keynes team in the past. Max Verstappen was fastest in the first practice session, whilst Parisian Hadjar finished a solid fourth.

Things didn’t go quite so well in the second practice session, with Max in P3 and Hadjar in fifth. At one point, four-time world champion Verstappen came on the radio and ranted like a madman: “What’s going on with my bloody gear changes? This is simply unacceptable!”

Sky GP expert Timo Glock knows: “We see it time and time again – Max complaining about sloppy upshifts or downshifts. It’s all about subtle nuances that can affect the car’s balance.”

Max admits: “I’m really sensitive when it comes to gear changes. We had a software update, and the system had to relearn, in a way, exactly how to handle the gear changes the way I’d like it to. It’s not that easy to explain. But fortunately, things were running better again by the end of the session.”

Verstappen says: “All in all, it was quite okay; I didn’t have any major problems. We managed to get the car into a good operating window.”

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“Perhaps in the second practice session we got a better sense of how far we really are from the front-runners. That’s no surprise – I’d expected as much.”

“This track is just very tricky when it comes to energy management. We’re also too slow on the straights compared to our rivals. But in terms of car balance, it was decent.”

The data backs up the comments from the 71-time Grand Prix winner: in the twisty central section, Red Bull Racing is right on the pace, but Verstappen and Hadjar lose time on the full-throttle sections of Sectors 1 and 3.