Red Bull boss Christian Horner said the team “simply don’t understand” the drop in pace from Q2 to Q3 during Saturday’s Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix qualifying session at Monza.
Max Verstappen set a 1:19.662s laptime during Saturday’s Q2 session with Sergio Perez posting a 1:20.216s tour of the Monza circuit.
But a bizarre turn of fortune in the Q3 top-10 shootout with fresh tyres saw Verstappen and Perez go four and two-tenths slower than their respective Q2 times – winding up seventh and eight in the final classification.
A bemused Verstappen post-qualifying said “going four-tenths slower than we did in Q2 is just not normal” and Horner’s assessment of the situation sharing the same sense of confusion.
“We simply don’t understand that we did a 1m19.6s on scrubbed tyres and then on two sets of new tyres couldn’t do better than 1m20.0s,” Horner told Sky Sports F1.
“The balance just isn’t there for [Verstappen], so there’s something that fundamentally is happening that we’re not on top of at the moment.
“We need to obviously understand it and understand why on the old tyres we are able to do that time, and two sets of new tyres we couldn’t get anywhere near it.
“In Q2 it didn’t look too bad. I mean, still the handling characteristics that Max has been talking about, but then Q3 there’s something amiss.
“The others can all improve on new tyres, but we were miles away.”
Verstappen’s last chart-topping qualifying effort in dry conditions came at the Austrian Grand Prix, a far cry from his run of seven straight poles at the start of the campaign.
Moreover, Verstappen hasn’t won in five Grands Prix amid persistent balance issues with the Dutchman even switching to an older spec floor at Zandvoort for a Dutch GP experiment.
That saw the Red Bull driver endure a 22s defeat to Lando Norris in the race and Horner stressed the importance of the team getting on top of its issues.
“We ran an older specification last weekend to see if that redressed any of the issues at all, and the reality was we still had the same handling characteristics and issues with that specification from the beginning of the year,” Horner said.
“That’s given an awful lot of data for the guys, but a lot to get our head around. And we need to address it quickly.
“We can see the McLarens have made a significant step over the last few races. And we’re now behind Ferrari and Mercedes here as well.
“There’s something that clearly isn’t working on the car, and we’re trying to unravel that.
“First of all, you’ve got to understand the problem and understand how to address it, and then implement it. There’ll be an engineering solution to an engineering problem.”
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