Max Verstappen has provided minor hope to his rivals at Formula 1’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix as he cited his practice woes will see him enter the race unprepared.
Despite recording four victories from the opening six races, Verstappen lamented balance issues with his Red Bull car across the first two practice sessions at Imola.
However, an extensive deep dive into the data overnight and more set-up tweaks post-FP3 inspired Verstappen to claim a narrow pole position over the McLaren duo.
With overtaking tending to be limited at the Italian venue and Red Bull more competitive on long runs, the Dutchman will enter the race as the overwhelming favourite.
But although Verstappen is more optimistic about his prospects amid his unexpected run to pole, the Red Bull driver has admitted that he is not sold on his race pace.
Asked whether he is prepared to convert his record-equalling eighth consecutive start from pole into another win, Verstappen responded: “Not at all.
“Yesterday was terrible in long run and short run. This morning, we wanted to do a long run, but then we only did three laps and also there it didn’t feel good.
“But I also had no balance in the short run, so it’s quite normal that on the long run it’s not good.
“Naturally I think with the balance I had in qualifying it will be better, but I’ve no clue against McLaren.
“They’ve been very strong yesterday in their long run so hopefully we can do something similar.”
The difficulties Verstappen has experienced in getting his Red Bull car into the sweet spot can be compared to Australia, where he also recovered to secure the pole.
Despite a technical issue curtailing his involvement on that occasion, the Emilia Romagna GP has the hallmarks of being the race Down Under that didn’t materialise.
Pressed on whether he had his work cut out to beat the McLarens and the Ferraris behind, Verstappen admitted: “Yeah for sure.
“The whole weekend we’ve been on the back foot. We managed to be on top in qualifying but that’s qualifying, the race can be a bit different.
“Normally I would like to be a little bit better prepared with a bit more information going into the race, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens in the race.”
However, Verstappen has denied that this weekend has shown Red Bull’s 2024 challenger is more troublesome to set up than its all-conquering RB18 predecessor.
When that proposition was proposed to him, Verstappen explained: “No, actually I thought from the start of the year it was actually easier compared to last year.
“I think the struggles that I had in some previous races were not as big as what we had here.
“It was more about fine-tuning a few little things, now we were just completely out of the window for my feeling to really push, so it just required a bit more attention to detail to try and fine-tune that. But I still think it’s a very strong car that I feel comfortable with, just this weekend has been very difficult to set it up, but hopefully we learned a lot from it.
“When we get to the next race… It’s always a tricky one, Monaco, to get everything out of the car because so many things can happen, but hopefully it’s a bit more consistent.”
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