Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar were left surprised by Red Bull’s pace in Qualifying for the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, with the pair set to start on Sunday from the third row of the grid.<\/p>\n
Both Verstappen<\/a> and Hajdar<\/a> were within four tenths of polesitter George Russell<\/a> having found performance with Red Bull<\/a>‘s RB22 on Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n “I think actually Qualifying went a little bit better than expected,” said Verstappen. “The gap was a lot smaller, looking back P5 looks decent but actually we had a really good opportunity for P3 but somehow in my final sector, just started sliding too much and just not following the normal line that you want to take.<\/p>\n “Also, I think it was only Oscar [Piastri] and me that did the [first flying] lap before the red [flag], and then like 10 minutes in the pits, you probably lose a little bit of rhythm as well which is not ideal in Q3.<\/p>\n “You want to do a lap, come in, refuel, put new tyres. You know where you lost a little bit of time and go out again. When you’re waiting around a bit, it’s probably not ideal but at the end for us, it was much better.<\/p>\n “I went into Qualifying thinking that we would be miles off and just be P7, P8, but this was promising.”<\/p>\n Hadjar finished just behind the four-time World Champion and admitted that he was disappointed to end up only P6, with Kimi Antonelli in P3 less than one-tenth quicker.<\/p>\n “Tough Friday, Saturday morning and then in Qualifying, it looks like we picked up the pace a bit,” said Hadjar.<\/p>\n “Especially as we moved to Q3. I don’t even know how we are three tenths off pole because we’ve been a second off the whole time. That’s a bit surprising and being so close to P3 is a bit disappointing [to miss out].”<\/p>\n The Frenchman believes Sunday’s 66-lap race “should be fun”, with high temperatures and multiple pit stops expected that mean strategy will be imperative.<\/p>\n When asked about his thoughts for the race, Hadjar said: “Lots of pit stops, lots of tyre degradation. I need a big Turn 1 and from there we need sharp pit stops and that’s it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar were left surprised by Red Bull’s pace in Qualifying for the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-475913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}