How ‘everything went wrong’ for Red Bull in United States GP as Verstappen rues ‘too many issues’

Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar shared a collective disappointment in their inability to fight for more points at the United States Grand Prix, with the Dutchman concluding that Red Bull faced “too many issues”.

Following his back-to-back victories in Malaysia and Singapore, Verstappen qualified in second place at the Circuit of The Americas as Hadjar took third, matching his best-ever Qualifying result.

Verstappen angled his RB22 for an aggressive start to pass polesitter Kimi Antonelli, but his launch instead left him at the mercy of Ferrari and he dropped behind Charles Leclerc before fighting his way back past.

From there, he pitted twice and took advantage of Lando Norris’ struggles on ageing tyres to reclaim P2 once again, although Leclerc ultimately demoted him to third in the closing stages of the race.

“We didn’t have the pace of Kimi,” Verstappen said. “At the same time I think the way we used our tyres, the order, was wrong – probably also the wrong compounds in hindsight, but that’s something to still understand because lately, the harder compounds have not been competitive and now suddenly they were.

“From our side, I think there were too many issues with the power unit unfortunately in terms of consistency. You can’t rely on a consistent balance through a corner because if every lap and every corner it’s doing something different, it’s very hard to be on top of things.

“A slow pit stop was also very costly today, so a few things to analyse and do better.

“It’s going to be a bit hit or miss, I guess – two really good weekends where we were on top of things, and here we weren’t on top of things. Different layout, of course, where you have a bit more high-speed corners. It seemed like we were not fantastic in the high-speed corners.”

Hadjar wasn’t best pleased either, having dropped to P5 on the opening lap with similar difficulties linked to his launch. He managed to improve back to the top three with an extended soft-tyre stint, but was ordered to let his team mate overtake him once Verstappen had moved onto fresh rubber.

When Hadjar eventually peeled into the pits, he got stuck on the incorrect engine mapping and faced a throttle problem as a result, which impacted his performance on the way to finishing P6.

He explained: “Everything went wrong. First of all, the race start – I did everything on my side. I had a clutch overdelivery so it was completely out of my control again. It’s really starting to p*** me off.

“It’s not a nice feeling when you know you're going to drop the clutch, you don’t know what you’re going to have. Today was very poor. That first stint was very strong. I kept extending. I had the pace of Kimi towards those last couple of laps, so I was quite confident. I was blocked on a pit stop throttle map, it was just undriveable and that was it for me.

“I’ve worked really hard on that race pace and today it showed. I was extremely comfortable on the softs, pushing them.

“The car was behaving really well – apart from all the electronic downsides, I think everything was positive. In a world where we can fix our starts, I think we can have a brilliant race.”