Max Verstappen went from P21 to P2 at the Formula 1 Sao Paulo Grand Prix, and blamed his car for having stopped working on slicks. His team principal, Laurent Mekies, agrees about the balance, but not that it cost him the win.
Max Verstappen started the São Paulo Grand Prix 21st after a power unit penalty was applied, triggered by what Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies noted as “a small issue on Friday”. He finished the race P2, 14.602 seconds behind current World Champion Lando Norris.
He was P12 after one lap and P7 by lap 5, passing Ferrari driver, Lewis Hamilton and taking McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and William’s Alex Albon in a double move. “No sim in the world would predict that you go from P21 to P2,” Mekies told Formula1.com.
After switching the tyres from intermediates to softs, Verstappen said the car changed. “I had extreme amounts of oversteer in the high-speed corners,” he told Sky Sports F1. Dialling that out, he said, killed his front tyres. He suspects something “fell off or broke”.
Quick on inters, level on softs
The other Red Bull is the fairest comparison here. On intermediates, Verstappen took around four seconds out of Isack Hadjar between laps 9 and 15, though Hadjar was also fighting Mercedes’ George Russell at the time.
On softs, the edge that Verstappen had disappeared. Once Verstappen cleared Kimi Antonelli on lap 24, the gap to Hadjar grew before closing only slowly. Verstappen radioed a loss of downforce, and Red Bull let him through at the start of lap 39 so he could chase Norris, who was by then 10 seconds clear of P2.
Unfortunately, luck was not on his side; over the next six laps, Verstappen lost around a second and a half to Norris, while Hadjar, now behind him, matched his pace. Mekies rated it Hadjar’s best race for the team “in terms of pure pace”, so part of the story may be Hadjar raising his level rather than Verstappen’s car dropping.
Fast over a lap, slow over a stint
Over a single lap, the Hadjar’s car looked quick. With Hadjar’s setting a 1m 12.877s on lap 52, beating Norris’s best, and Verstappen’s 1m 13.131s was within 0.148 seconds of the McLaren’s, set four laps earlier with more fuel on board.
In 2026, though, one fast lap says less about a chassis than it used to. Battery recharging is largely controlled by the car’s software, and how much energy a car deploys on a given lap can swing its straight-line speed. Telemetry data by TracingInsights puts almost all of Hadjar’s 0.254-second advantage over Verstappen’s best on the straights, not in the corners.
The deficit came over a stint. Through the middle of the race, Verstappen’s lap times stayed flat while Norris got quicker as his fuel burned off. That is consistent with a car wearing out its front tyres, as Verstappen described.
What could cause it
Fast corners rely on strong aerodynamic grip; slow ones rely more on the mechanical grip. Losing rear downforce, for example through damage to the floor edge or diffuser, would make the rear step out at high speed while leaving the slow corners largely unaffected.
Calming a nervous rear, whether through cockpit settings, a balance change at a stop or a gentler driving style, usually means asking more of the front tyres. Which is the trade-off Verstappen described, and it would leave the car feeling wrong on any compound until the underlying problem with the car was fixed, which is unlikely to be fixed mid-race without retiring the car.
The verdict
Mekies backed Verstappen on the balance. From the switch to slicks, he said, Verstappen was “very, very unhappy with car balance, including when we came back to the inters”. But he did not say anything was broken, and he conceded that McLaren were “a bit faster than us” regardless of where Verstappen started.
Red Bull now has to work out how much time the problem actually cost. Until it does, the data supports half of Verstappen’s story. He drove what he and the data would call a “difficult car” brilliantly. Whether it was broken is still open, and whether it cost him the win is something even his own boss doubts.
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