‘Everything fell apart’ – Verstappen left frustrated by ‘painful’ P7 in Austria Qualifying

Max Verstappen’s previously impressive Qualifying record at the Red Bull Ring was cut short as he ended the session down in seventh position, with neither he nor his team mate Yuki Tsunoda showing any signs of optimism for the upcoming Austrian Grand Prix.

Although he wasn’t quite able to take the top spot across practice, the Dutchman was firmly in the top three heading into Qualifying, and any error by McLaren could have seen him claim his fifth pole position at the circuit.

This failed to materialise, but instead of remaining in the usual top three behind the papaya frontrunners, Verstappen dropped back in the order to P7 as his final flying lap had to be aborted due to yellow flags brought out for a spin by Pierre Gasly.

The result is his joint worst Qualifying of the season and leaves polesitter Lando Norris and third-placed Oscar Piastri with the perfect opportunity to further extend their lead over Verstappen in the Drivers' Standings.

He earlier described the Red Bull as “nervous” and “snappy” in FP3, but these problems seemed to worsen as Qualifying went on.

“Everything fell apart a bit,” he said afterwards. “Every corner was a bit of a struggle to be honest. No balance, no front, no rear in different places of the corner, so that made it very difficult to get in a rhythm and a bit of a benchmark.

“Even with the final lap, of course I had a yellow so I had to abort. It was still not even close to pole so that was quite a painful Qualifying for us.”

Asked whether the car’s race pace indicated any room for improvement in the Grand Prix, he responded: “Yeah but tomorrow’s probably going to be even warmer than today.

"It seems like as soon as it got warmer, it made our struggles even worse. That doesn’t look great, but we’ll see tomorrow. Maybe [there will be] some surprises in the race.”

Overall, it was a session to quickly forget for Red Bull as Tsunoda experienced a similar phenomenon to his team mate. After claiming P7 and P9 in FP2 and FP3 respectively, he was knocked out in Q1 despite being just over two-tenths adrift of Verstappen up in P7.

With remarkably close margins separating the entire field, the Japanese driver ended up in P18, later reporting issues with the balance just like Verstappen.

Prompted to explain exactly what went wrong, Tsunoda replied: “I don’t know, I’ll have to check but the balance was completely off on the last lap. I felt quite good on the first push but the second push was somehow completely off.

“I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong with the warm up or anything. To be honest, the balance was completely different so it’s hard to explain that.

“Even if the pace is good, ending up like this is so frustrating. The balance in the end just meant I couldn’t put together a time. I have to talk with the engineers.”