Max Verstappen says Red Bull’s RB16B “didn’t feel great to drive” during practice in Monaco and believes the team’s performance has so far been “very weak.”
Verstappen, who has never taken a podium finish in Monaco, finished the second practice session fourth, but just 0.007s behind title rival Lewis Hamilton.
However the championship challengers finished almost four-tenths adrift of pacesetter Charles Leclerc as Ferrari locked out the leading two positions.
“We are too slow, not just a little bit, quite a bit,” conceded Verstappen.
“We really need to find some pace because everyone has traffic so you have to look at the optimal lap times or optimal sectors, and we are quite off.
“And also it didn’t feel great to drive. Normally I am quite comfortable in the car, quite easily [able] to get to a pace, but it all takes too long and just not how I like it. Maybe so far, the most difficult weekend.”
On whether Verstappen was surprised at the situation he replied: “Yeah, I am just surprised how competitive Ferrari is but I think it just shows that we are pretty weak.
“They’re doing very well and we are very weak, so then the offset is very big. Luckily we have a free day tomorrow so we can look into things. A lot of things need to change, I think.
“The gap they [Ferrari] have is big around here. We need to improve a lot to match them.”
Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez finished down in eighth position.
“I had a pretty bad run on the Soft [tyre], a lot of traffic,” said Perez, explaining his predicament. “I couldn’t put my final sector together because basically, my best sector was on the Medium tyre.”
