Max Verstappen has been discovered with a deadly decease which he have been …
Finding a remedy to the team’s situation, where it seemed to struggle for a cadence over the kerbs and through the second sector of the Imola circuit, was going to test the team’s usual overnight work heading into Saturday. Both the trackside and factory divisions at Red Bull had to get their hands dirty to decipher the root cause of Verstappen and Sergio Perez’s problems throughout Friday, burning the midnight oil to find something that would rescue its weekend.
McLaren and Ferrari were both ahead of Red Bull in the one-lap pace stakes on Friday. On the hard tyre, Mercedes even looked to be a threat on the FP2 long runs versus the medium-shod RB20s.
The Red Bulls’ pace had been improved slightly by Saturday’s FP3 session, but the car was still not entirely comfortable to drive. It resulted in a nervy wait for qualifying, as tinkering persisted to unlock something in the important sessions.
But there’s one maxim in theatre that Red Bull hoped to follow: “it’ll be alright on the night”. Net result? Verstappen claimed pole over both McLarens, while the Ferraris didn’t really get a look in for a potential front-row start. A tangible sense of relief exuded from Verstappen who had admitted that, after Friday’s running, he’d have simply been content with a top-five result from qualifying.
It was through Acque Minerali where Red Bull struggled to make a splash on Friday. The shifting balance of the car made the RB20 difficult to drive through the double right-hander; sometimes, the car felt too on-the-nose as the balance of grip shifted excessively towards the front tyres. Verstappen thought he was going to spin in those instances, noting that it was “easy to lose the car” after FP2.
Pulling at the main threads from the trackside team’s post-FP2 debriefs and the simulator support work at the factory, Red Bull made changes to the car for FP3 – but now, there were different problems to solve. “We tried a lot of things, of course quite different to what we had yesterday,” Verstappen explained of the team’s overnight work. “But then even this morning it was not really feeling that great, because the balance shifted the other way. We wanted to optimise a few things here and there, but it was just a lot more difficult than we expected it to be, for whatever reason.”
“But everyone just stuck together. They kept on thinking about what we could do, also back at the factory, and we got there in the end.”
The balance shift might be partly down to the effect of wind; Friday’s practice sessions were slightly breezier by comparison to a still Saturday afternoon, but other environmental factors – track temperature, the impact of support categories rubbering in the circuit, and general track evolution – will have had their part to play in FP3 feeling different. Both drivers were adamant that the new upgrades were not behind the problems, Verstappen giving them his appraisal of “they did the job”.
