Max Verstappen Silverstone P7: “Disaster, embarrassing, it makes no sense”

Right from the first lap, something was wrong with Max Verstappen’s race car. Early on in qualifying for the historic British Grand Prix, the 71-time Grand Prix winner came over the radio to complain: “This engine just isn’t responding normally.”

No offence to Isack Hadjar’s heavy right foot, but when Max Verstappen is regularly slower than the young Parisian – pardon me – then something is simply not right.

And so it continued: at Silverstone, Verstappen looked as though he were driving around with a millstone on his rear wing, and when this botched qualifying session was finally over, the 2023 Silverstone winner groaned: “What a disaster! Unbelievable…”

The 28-year-old Dutchman then elaborated: “Nothing worked. On the one hand, the car’s balance isn’t good enough; on the other, we’re slow on the straights. And as far as my part of the team is concerned, we’re slower everywhere.”

“The nasty thing is: if you’re too slow on the straights, you have to use more battery power, but that comes back to haunt you in the final part of the lap. You then reach the point where you’ve got absolutely no electrical energy left, and then you’re completely screwed.”

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“We’ve got a problem with the engine that we can’t get to the bottom of. And that naturally raises a lot of questions for me about how we should proceed. It was just embarrassing and terrible today. And if we go into the race like this, there’s no point.”