Max Verstappen: ‘Red Bull shouldn’t be battling Racing Bulls’

Max Verstappen has declared that Red Bull’s Dutch Grand Prix battle with a Racing Bulls car “shouldn’t be happening”.

Verstappen and Racing Bulls Formula 1 driver Isack Hadjar ran third and fourth behind the McLarens during most of the Zandvoort race; both of them ended up on the podium, courtesy of Lando Norris’ late-race retirement.

“Of course, happy to be on the podium, but in terms of speed it wasn’t good,” Verstappen told Dutch F1 broadcaster Viaplay. “I think it was purely down to qualifying that I was third in the race, because in terms of speed it really wasn’t there.”

Despite finishing the race on soft tyres when the McLarens ran on hard rubber, Verstappen’s fastest lap was 0.650s slower than race winner Oscar Piastri’s. “McLaren is on another level,” he rued. “I don’t even compare myself with that.”

Verstappen briefly snatched second place from Norris at the start but was subsequently shadowed by Hadjar all along, with the gap between them never exceeding three seconds in green-flag conditions – hence the four-time world champion’s concerns about his lack of performance.

“The whole race we were basically fighting with our sister team based on pure pace,” he pointed out. “That shouldn’t be happening.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, Isack Hadjar, Racing Bulls

Photo by: Mark Thompson - Getty Images

“That’s just not good. But in a way, we know that those problems are there in our car.”

Red Bull has regularly struggled to unleash the full potential of its RB21 this year due to narrow set-up windows. In Zandvoort, Verstappen diverged from his rivals on strategy by not running the hard compound in the race, due to that tyre ‘really feeling terrible’ in Friday practice.

“Absolutely no mechanical grip,” the 27-year-old explained. “But everyone else can drive on that tyre, except us. So that also means that something is just wrong. That’s why I used the soft and medium, those tyres give a bit more mechanical grip in slow corners, where we were struggling a lot.

“The car is just not fast enough. I also had to save a lot in those fast corners. While everyone goes through Turns 7 and 8 much faster, I have no grip. That’s obviously not good. Of course, in qualifying it was better over one lap, but this season the car is just not good in the race.”

While Verstappen and Red Bull are likely experiencing their first title-less season since 2020, Racing Bulls has already scored 60 points – the Faenza-based squad’s best tally since its record 2021 campaign.

At the time, Pierre Gasly had made a whopping 18 Q3 appearances and registered 12 top-seven finishes, scoring the lion’s share of the team’s 142 points in the standings. But Red Bull was in contention for the title, so the brand’s two outfits weren’t rivalling one another the way they sometimes are this year.

This is compounded by Red Bull’s second car painfully struggling to record any meaningful results, whoever ends up driving it. Incumbent Yuki Tsunoda ended a seven-round point-less streak at Zandvoort, but he consistently lapped one second slower than Hadjar, though traffic did not help the Japanese racer.

Additional reporting by Ronald Vording