Max Verstappen called his China Sprint experience ‘a disaster’ after the Red Bull driver recovered to only ninth and outside the points after a poor start.<\/p>\n
The four-time World Champion started P8 for Saturday’s 19-lap Sprint<\/a> but fell almost to the back of the field after he struggled to get his RB22 off the line at the start.<\/p>\n The Dutchman recovered up the order after making a late pit stop for soft Pirelli tyres under a Safety Car, but fell short of finishing in the points after a difficult race.<\/p>\n “I had no power, probably a similar issue to what Liam [Lawson] had in Melbourne,” said Verstappen<\/a> on his poor start.<\/p>\n “But even after that, of course I could make my way forward a little bit but [had] terrible balance [and] more degradation than the people around me in the midfield. Pretty much a disaster I would say.”<\/p>\n Red Bull<\/a> team mate Isack Hadjar<\/a> fared little better, the Frenchman having collided with Kimi Antonelli on the opening lap, with the Mercedes driver handed a 10-second penalty for the incident.<\/p>\n Hadjar was able to continue but with damage, negating any advantage he might have had starting on the soft tyre compared with the medium runners around him.<\/p>\n After a brief battle with Verstappen and also pitting under the Safety Car, Hadjar eventually slipped to P15 at the chequered flag.<\/p>\n “With damage I couldn’t do anything,” said Hadjar. “We wanted to understand how the soft was working but we didn’t get a read in the end.<\/p>\n “There’s a few things to change that’s for sure,” he added when asked about the rest of the weekend. “We don’t expect to be finding a second, or two seconds, that’s for sure. It’s going to be a long one.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen called his China Sprint experience ‘a disaster’ after the Red Bull driver recovered to only ninth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-539521","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\/539521","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=539521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}