Max Verstappen has explained the reasons behind his “frustrating” retirement from the Chinese Grand Prix, with the Dutchman admitting that Red Bull have a “lot to learn from” after a difficult weekend for the team.
After labelling his experience in Saturday’s Sprint as a “disaster”, Verstappen started from eighth for Sunday’s event but found himself running further down the field during the race, having dropped backwards at the start. He eventually retired from the running after 45 laps with a car issue.
Reflecting on his tough day at the Shanghai International Circuit, the four-time World Champion explained: “Same problem as yesterday in the start, so we were last again, and then tried to find my way forwards but again [we had] the same problem as in the Sprint, where there was just a lot of deg, a lot of graining on the tyres.
“That always makes it very complicated, and then we had to retire the car with the ERS [Energy Recovery System] cooling issues.”
Pushed on how the team can move forwards from a challenging few days in China – before the next round of the season in Japan – Verstappen responded: “Yeah, I mean a lot to learn from. It’s definitely not where we want to be, of course, but I also know that the team is giving it everything, so it’s frustrating for me but also frustrating for them.
“At the end of the day we need to try and figure it out together. We’ll of course try to be a bit better for Japan, but after that we have a bit of a bigger break now that hopefully we can use to sort some stuff out.”
On the other side of the garage, Isack Hadjar faced an eventful race. After starting from ninth on the grid, the French driver engaged in a first-lap battle with Haas’ Ollie Bearman before going on to spin off the track.
While he rejoined, Hadjar had fallen down the order – but an action-packed race that also featured a number of retirements saw the Red Bull racer recover to a final result of P8, scoring four valuable points for the team.
“I didn’t see that [first-lap spin] coming,” Hadjar conceded after the race. “The rear snapped out so fast, and it’s a shame because we had a good start.
“Still somehow we got quite lucky with some cars having issues and us ending up in the points when clearly our pace was not great the whole weekend. We got lucky on that, and we need to regroup and do better.”
Asked if he takes some personal satisfaction from getting everything out of the car on a tricky weekend, Hadjar answered: “Yeah, sure. Since Melbourne, apart from the mistake I did on Lap 1, I think I’m quite happy about my own performance. That’s all I can do so far, and improve our car.”