Max Verstappen and team-mate Chris Lulham and Ben Barnicoat will start only 15th for the GT World Challenge race at Portimao that Verstappen is contesting in his break between Formula 1 races.<\/p>\n
Verstappen’s return to the GT scene got off to an eventful start as he tapped Ezequiel Perez Companc’s Audi into a spin in a traffic jam on his first lap in morning practice.<\/p>\n
Stewards looked at the incident but took no action, and by the end of the second practice session the Verstappen crew was up to fourth.<\/p>\n
But they struggled in qualifying, their Mercedes visibly running lower than most and kicking up abundant sparks in the twilight session as they managed only 15th on the 61-car grid.<\/p>\n
While Barnicoat called 15th a “could be worse” situation, he admitted the 2 Seas Motorsport-run Verstappen team had taken a wrong turn with the set-up.<\/p>\n
“We felt like we’d been missing a little bit of speed – we’ve been quite high up\u00a0the timesheets but none of us were super happy,” he said.<\/p>\n
“So we tried a couple of things there and obviously it didn’t quite work out – lots of sparking, a lot of bouncing in a straight line, so I think we just missed it a little bit.”<\/p>\n
The three-hour race starts at 5pm local time on Saturday. The Boutsen VDS Porsche of Dorian Boccalacci, Morris Schuring and Alessio Picariello starts from pole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen and team-mate Chris Lulham and Ben Barnicoat will start only 15th for the GT World Challenge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":935581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-935580","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\/935580","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=935580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}