Verstappen unsurprised by Red Bull’s pace deficit

World Champion Max Verstappen says he was unsurprised by Red Bull’s pace deficit at the conclusion of a difficult day of practice for Formula 1’s Dutch Grand Prix.

Verstappen had a truncated start to proceedings due to a gearbox issue and wound up only eighth-best at the end of the second session.

“We missed out on valuable time in FP1 and then the balance wasn’t great in FP2,” said Verstappen, who leads the standings by 93 points.

“In an hour-long session you can’t really change much on the car, so we just had to deal with what we had.

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“Today wasn’t great but we’ll have a look at everything overnight, for sure we can do better than this.

“I wasn’t surprised when I saw the time difference, there are a lot of things that we can improve on, we’ve got FP3 tomorrow morning to try out a few things ahead of qualifying.”

Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez classified in 12th place.

Perez conceded that the RB18 is not as strong as it was in Belgium but that his classification was skewered by factors out of his control.

“Things are very marginal and Ferrari seem to be very strong around this circuit so, as I predicted, it is going to be an interesting weekend,” he said.

“It is a pretty challenging track and I think we are lacking speed throughout at the moment, we haven’t been quick in any of the sectors, so there is analysis to be done.

“We haven’t been as happy as we were in Belgium so there are things we need to look at to make sure we pick up on everything to be in the mix for quali.

“I got a lot of traffic today, I got one of the Ferraris on my fast lap and I couldn’t get a proper read on my soft tyre unfortunately, without causing an incident.

“Degradation seems to be pretty high on the long runs so it will be interesting to see what we are able to do with the strategy. We certainly need to improve for qualifying tomorrow.”