Max Verstappen labelled Friday at the Chinese Grand Prix as a \u201cdisaster pace-wise\u201d, with the Red Bull driver suggesting that he does not yet know what the team will do to address the issues for the rest of the weekend after ending Sprint Qualifying in P8.<\/p>\n
Having placed in eighth on the timesheets during the event\u2019s sole practice session, Verstappen<\/a> took the same position when it came to Qualifying for the Sprint<\/a> later in the day, leaving the Dutchman to rue the problems that he experienced on his car.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole day has been a disaster pace-wise,\u201d said Verstappen. \u201c[I had] no grip \u2013 honestly I think that\u2019s the biggest problem \u2013 no balance, just losing massive amounts of time in the corners, to be honest.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then of course because of that, you start to trigger other little problems. The big problem for us is just the cornering \u2013 it\u2019s completely out.\u201d<\/p>\n Pushed on whether the squad would look to make changes for Saturday\u2019s Qualifying ahead of Sunday\u2019s Grand Prix, Verstappen responded: \u201cWe\u2019ll have a look. I don\u2019t know at the moment what we can do, but yeah, we\u2019ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n It was also a tricky day for Isack Hadjar<\/a> on the other side of the Red Bull<\/a> garage, the Frenchman ending SQ3 of Sprint Qualifying at the bottom of the top 10.<\/p>\n Quizzed on whether he had lost half a second on the straight during his effort, Hadjar explained: \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened yet and why we lost half a second.<\/p>\n \u201cI was happy with my lap \u2013 it was good, but I don\u2019t think that is going to change our weekend. I\u2019m just happy to be not too far from Max.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of whether the team\u2019s position came as a surprise \u2013 and if he had been anticipating that it would be better \u2013 the 21-year-old answered: \u201cNo, I was expecting the McLaren<\/a> and the Ferrari<\/a> to be ahead. I didn\u2019t expect the gap overall to increase.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen labelled Friday at the Chinese Grand Prix as a \u201cdisaster pace-wise\u201d, with the Red Bull driver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-537977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}