In a Qualifying session full of talking points, Max Verstappen\u2019s early exit in Q1 was one of the biggest shocks around Interlagos, with the Red Bull driver labelling it another sign of a \u201ctough weekend\u201d as he prepares to line up 16th.<\/p>\n
The Dutchman, who had been over 100 points adrift of the championship lead at one stage, had experienced a resurgence in recent rounds and arrived in Sao Paulo just 36 points behind Lando Norris.<\/p>\n
However, a lacklustre Sprint saw him go from sixth to fourth position, where he was unable to find a way past the Mercedes of George Russell. He reported issues with the car bouncing excessively, giving the team plenty to do in the few hours before Qualifying began.<\/p>\n
In Q1, Verstappen confirmed that the ride was smoother but the changes meant that the car was now sliding around a lot more, giving him no grip around the circuit. He was unable to get on top of the problem before the clock ticked down, leaving him frustrated and down in P16.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not what you want to see,\u201d he said after the session. \u201cThe whole weekend has already been quite tough but this is a bit unexpected, I would say, after changing quite a bit on the car.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just not responding. I had no grip out there so I had to really massively underdrive it basically. It just didn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n
In one of the highlights of last season, Verstappen drove from P17 to victory in Sao Paulo amid heavy rainfall, but an equally dramatic downpour would seemingly have to occur for him to have any chance of replicating the feat in Sunday\u2019s Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
Asked whether he and the team were tempted to change the power unit ahead of the race, he answered: \u201cNot necessarily, but we\u2019ll look at all of that tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result was one of Red Bull’s exceedingly rare double Q1 exits as Yuki Tsunoda found himself the last of the runners in 19th place, with Kick Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto unable to take part in the session following his heavy Sprint crash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a Qualifying session full of talking points, Max Verstappen\u2019s early exit in Q1 was one of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-270899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}