Red Bull F1 car ‘more difficult than expected’ at US GP

Red Bull’s F1 car has proven “more difficult than we expected” at the F1 race in Austin, the team says.

The Milton Keynes-based team arrived at the Circuit of the Americas having won the previous two races in a row with Max Verstappen, who has been on the podium every year since 2017 at the Circuit of the Americas.

The Dutch driver complained about the bumpiness of the track surface on Thursday, but was competitive on Friday, finishing second in FP1 and third in FP2, behind Charles Leclerc in both instances.

But for Isack Hadjar things proved more challenging, finishing ninth and a second off the pace in FP2.

“We had an okay FP1 and then in FP2 I felt okay as well on the medium [compound tyres], even though we changed the car,” said Hadjar, speaking to Formula1.com after the second practice.

“But on the soft, the car was completely gone for me. Very difficult to drive, so I need to turn things around tomorrow, sit down and see what we can do because the car made a massive step down. 

“We need to bring at least back to the level it was [on Friday] morning.”

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache admitted that the team had been caught out by the difficulty in getting the car properly balanced for the technical COTA layout.

“This track is quite bumpy – to rebalance the car was more difficult than we expected,” he said.

“Then we have a lot of work to do on both cars, to be honest, and especially on Isack’s [Hadjar] car to try to rebalance high speed to low speed that is challenging. 

“The main focus is also the race, we have to be careful to not focus too much on the one-lap performance – here, the degradation in the race is very important.”