Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar both complained about the ride of the Red Bull RB22 in Sprint Qualifying ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, with the former stating “my feet were flying off the pedals”.
The pair were left on the fourth row of the grid for Saturday’s 23-lap Sprint, with Verstappen more than half a second adrift of polesitter, George Russell.
Verstappen admitted that the feeling in the car “was not very good” and that Red Bull seemed to be some way still adrift of Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari in Montreal.”I mean I’m not surprised. My feeling in the car was not very good, I was struggling a lot with the ride of the car all over the bumps” he said.
“Couldn’t put my foot down. My feet were even flying off the pedals. Just made it very difficult to be consistent and that’s something that we need to investigate.
“It was not great. Of course, we are stuck with that for the Sprint but some other things to understand and hopefully that will then be a bit better for Qualifying.”Team mate Hadjar was encouraged to be closer to Verstappen in Sprint Qualifying having struggled for pace last time out in Miami, and after also not running the soft tyre extensively in the single Free Practice session earlier on Friday.
“In FP1, I didn’t even get a time on the soft so I had poor references and was building up slowly,” he said.
“I had finally a good feeling in SQ3 on the soft. I’m happy about that final lap and also the gap to my team mate is closer than Miami so it’s a bit reassuring but at the moment, we both don’t have a good feeling in the car.”
Like Verstappen, Hadjar was also critical of the ride in the Red Bull, with the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve notorious for having a bumpy surface in places and the need to straddle kerbs in order to post a quick lap time.
Hadjar added: “We are struggling massively with bouncing and the track state is not good, we’re losing a lot of time. Even if the grip is there we can’t use it.”
