Though he leaves Bahrain within touching distance of championship leader Lando Norris, Max Verstappen is aware that the writing is on the wall.
Effectively, the Dutchman played a bit part this weekend, a spectator, as the title fight continues without him.
“No pace, tyres overheating, the balance was bad, and then in the race bad start, bad pit stops, so yeah, everything went wrong,” he sighed at race end.
“The pit stops, of course, normally we are good at, but today everything went wrong,” he added.
Indeed, Red Bull are usually the benchmark when it comes to pit stops, but both the Dutchman and his teammate were compromised by an issue – subsequently found to be a wiring loom – that cost them precious time.
“The balance in general has been bad, and our tyre management has been quite poor,” said the four-time champ. And of course on a track like this it’s always highlighted, because the degradation is very high.
“This is probably one of the worst tracks for us, hopefully when we go to Jeddah it will all be a little bit better.”
Asked to explain where he felt the race went wrong, the Dutchman replied: “The start was not good, then the pace was not good in the beginning, just tyres overheating again, the balance was not where I wanted it to be.
“Then the first pit stop something went wrong with the lights, they stayed on. Now you can drive through the lights, but that’s not the protocol of the team. I had to just wait, but I realised there was a problem. Then I was stuck in traffic.
“The hard tyres unfortunately didn’t work, they were just lower grip and an even higher degradation for me.
“We pitted again, an even worse pit stop, so then I was last.
“Considering everything to still finish P6 with the pace that we had, I think it’s still a good result, there’s not much more that I guess we could have done,” he admitted.
“We’ve been struggling with two issues this weekend,” Christian Horner subsequently revealed, “a braking issue, and, an imbalance, and when you have that then everything looks worse.
“On top of that, we’ve had a horrible day where we had what looks like a wiring loom issue in the pit gantry that caused there to be a problem with the traffic light.
“So, yes, all in all, to actually come away with a 6th place and limit it to an 8-point deficit to Lando with the challenges that we’ve had, you know, we need to leave here, obviously focus on what we can sort out for Jeddah in five days’ time.”
Asked for more details in terms of the pit stop issue, he explained: “I just heard that there was some kind of wiring or electrical issue with the gantry. One I certainly haven’t seen before, where I mean the drivers live by those traffic lights, and the actual stops were pretty good, one of them was a two-second stop.
“But then the driver’s waiting for the lights and obviously it didn’t go out so everything’s gone into quarantine… we’ll have a good look at it.
“Max came in the first stop, and the light in the thing… and it’s a very simple system that we expected that maybe the button hadn’t been pressed hard enough by one of the technicians, and the next pit stop was within one minute. And then it happened again, and at that point, we went into a manual override on the system, and the chief mechanic released the car.”
P6 or not, even the fact that Yuki Tsunoda made it a double points finish doesn’t hide the fact that Red Bull is fast becoming an ‘also ran’ and that with each race weekend the chances of holding on to Verstappen increasingly diminish.
As one would expect, the Lord High Executioner is not happy.
“It’s a very difficult day for Red Bull, that’s obvious to all of us,” said Helmut Marko. “We have to get, as soon as possible, performance in the car again and also standards like a pitstop have to work. The car is not the fastest and then the pit stops are not working. That is not acceptable.”
“Very alarming,” said the Austrian, when asked about the pit stoip issue.
“We know that we are not competitive,” he continued, “and there will be parts coming in the coming races, and hopefully they bring improvement.
“We have a lot of problems. The main problem is balance and grip. And out of this, I guess the problems with the brakes came up. And then the normal procedure like a pitstop is not working, so one issue comes after the other.”
It’s understood that in the aftermath Marko and Horner held a meeting with technical director Pierre Wache and chief engineer Paul Monaghan in a bid to discuss how to stop the rot.
No doubt, Max, his father and manager Raymond Vermeulen were holding their own meeting(s).
Check out our Sunday gallery from Manama here.
