Max Verstappen believes it will be \u201ctough\u201d to replicate his Sprint victory in Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix after qualifying in fourth.<\/p>\n
The Dutchman controlled Saturday\u2019s Sprint<\/a> after making use of a low-drag set up to jump Oscar Piastri<\/a> on the opening lap for the lead. But after adding extra downforce amid concerns of rain for the Grand Prix, Verstappen<\/a> slipped to P4 in Qualifying.<\/p>\n \u201cWe opted a little bit [on the set up] looking for tomorrow, but somehow, the balance didn\u2019t really improve with that change, and that\u2019s a bit weird,\u201d the Red Bull driver explained.<\/p>\n \u201cEspecially in Q3, the first set felt awful. The second set, we tried something else, and it just didn\u2019t give me any grip starting the lap.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I had a lot of wheelspin starting the lap out of the last corner, and the same thing happened out of Turn 1. I just lost two tenths on my own lap time already, which is not ideal.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom there, we tried to catch up a bit of lap time. Of course, without that problem in Turn 1, you look quite ok, you are quite close to the McLarens. But overall, it\u2019s not been a very good Qualifying.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite altering his set up for the predicted wet weather, Verstappen was cautious over his chances in Sunday\u2019s Grand Prix.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that will be tough,\u201d he conceded. \u201cFirst, if it\u2019s wet, you can\u2019t see anything, so you can\u2019t really do anything on lap one.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope that we can fight back to a podium, but normally in the wet conditions, McLaren is also really fast. They have that really under control now with how the engine is operating.<\/p>\n “So I\u2019m not making any kind of illusion, we just need to be realistic, and we just need to work on our balance first of all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen believes it will be \u201ctough\u201d to replicate his Sprint victory in Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1687,372,6537,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-26780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}