The account is not there, and it is not difficult to quantify the malaise which seized Max Verstappen and his Red Bull team, Friday in Miami. The Dutchman finished the first day of training for the fifth round of the World Cup with 24 laps on the clock; 23 during free practice 1 and only one during free practice 2. In other words, a disaster given the challenge of learning the Florida circuit for drivers and technicians alike.
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“How do you want me to learn the circuit?”, sighed the reigning world champion, when his engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, asked him to come back halfway through free practice 1. The RB18 driver felt he needed to drive to master a circuit deemed complicated in the area at bridge level (turns 11 to 16). In the end, his lap quota was reduced by an overheating problem during the first training session, and reduced to nothing – a reconnaissance lap – during the second session.
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“It was not a good day for usadmitted the Batavian, third in free 1, 0″179 behind Charles Leclerc (Ferrari), his rival in the race for the world title. We wanted to ride to learn the track and attack from the start but things didn’t go according to plan. We had hydraulic problems: as soon as I entered the track, I couldn’t really turn the steering wheel and my brakes were also on fire, so there were several problems. We don’t have a huge amount of information and data for my car, which could make qualifying and the race difficult.”
No useful data from Pérez’s side
“He had a horrible daycommented the director of Red Bull Racing, at the microphone of Sky Sports. There was a problem this morning, and as a precaution we changed the gearbox and one of the radiators. He came out of the pitlane (in free practice 2) and had a hydraulic problem which caused damage to his rear brakes. He thinks he had five timed laps today.”
“He will do more laps than normal in Free Practice 3 to get used to the circuit. We know how good he is at adapting to new layouts and I’m sure he will make up for that lost time.”
Bad luck, both sessions were hashed by red flags and his teammate Sergio Pérez also came out of his car frustrated. “This afternoon’s session was very messy: in total I did one lap in ‘medium’ and two in ‘soft’exposed the Mexican, respectively fourth and third time. With the tank full, there was nothing to do because of the red flags (Sainz, Latifi). We’re just going to go into the race blind and I think many others will be like us.”
The condition of the grip also worries him. “There is not so much grip on the trajectory and outside it is as if we were in the wet”added “Checo”.
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