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After yesterday’s dramatically poor qualifying, in which Verstappen and Perez died in Q2, the Red Bull F1 team admits guilt. They say they made a mistake.
Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez qualified eleventh and thirteenth for the Singapore GP. The Red Bull drivers have been experiencing problems all throughout the race weekend and the performance has not been good at all. Max Verstappen himself said he was in ‘shock’. At Red Bull they admit they made a mistake.
“We have some inherent issues that we can’t necessarily solve during a race weekend,” said Paul Monaghan, head of car engineering at Red Bull. “We made some mistakes and all together that caused us to go out in Q2.”
According to Monaghan, the problems Red Bull is facing are not fundamental, although there are of course rumors that the FIA’s new measures have hurt the team. However, to date there have been no concrete indications or confirmation of this. According to Monaghan, this mainly concerns problems with the setup of the car.
“We had some problems on Friday morning, then on Friday afternoon we had other problems,” Monaghan reflected on Red Bull’s race weekend so far. “It looked like we were making progress on Saturday morning in the third practice session and then we made a mistake in qualifying.”
“The margins are small and we didn’t give either driver the car that was good enough for them to perform better than they did.”
“If we could start over again, we would certainly have done it differently. A lot of teams in the pit lane are probably saying that. I think we piled up some mistakes and then we had to take them.”
It is striking that Red Bull brought two versions of its RB19 for the race weekend in Singapore. However, it decided not to use its new floor after testing it on Friday. Red Bull then had to make larger changes than usual to its car, which led to additional problems and doubts.
“On Friday we had all kinds of doubts and question marks,” Monaghan said. “We weren’t on it and the weekend didn’t start as well as most of our race weekends so far.”
“Of course you question yourself, we ask ourselves questions about many things, if that is not the case then that is laconic. We then had to make bigger changes than usual.”
“But that was just the situation and the circumstances we found ourselves in. We weren’t so happy on Friday. But it is what it is, this is the situation we find ourselves in. We were out in Q2 and anything can still happen. Unfortunately, we are on a street circuit.”