Verstappen: 'degrading' Red Bull 'getting worse and worse' in Hungary
Max Verstappen says Red Bull suffered "car degradation" during Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying, and that his RB22 was rendered "completely undriveable" by the end of Q3.
Verstappen spun at the final corner on his last attempt in Q3, though was already labouring at that point to improve on his previous best.
He told race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase over team radio: "Mate, the car is just completely broken aerodynamically, it's just getting worse and worse. What a joke. What. A. Joke, honestly. What a s**t weekend."
He then later continued to vent on the in-lap, saying that "massive degradations in qualifying" caused the car to become "completely undriveable".
Team-mate Isack Hadjar had also spun in the RB22, albiet in the second qualifying segment.
"The weekend in general has been difficult, but when, instead of the tyres degrading, the car is degrading, then you have a big problem. So that's what's happened," Verstappen said afterwards - though he was still just five tenths off pole, which was in line with where he had been through practice.
"The car just kept getting worse and worse, lap after lap. So the more laps I did, it was just more and more difficult to put a lap together. For tomorrow as well, we need to fix that, because the car is not driveable like this.
"As you can see in the final corner, I mean, it just turned in, the car is, like, non-existent in the rear. So it's really crazy."
Verstappen said it's not the first time this year he's tracked this kind of trend but "I always feel it's a different problem, and that's why we think it's harder to control".
"I firstly need to look into the data myself. We can see a loss in aero, and it kept getting worse. So that's not good," he added.
"Normally it [the car] gets better. But my car just kept oversteering more and more. I think I'm quite good at understanding when there is a problem, or when I feel something is not right.
"The car just became uncontrollable in some corners in entry, the feeling that you have [of] the car just not sticking anymore. I've felt it before, but this, again, it's not good."
Hadjar made no reference to any physical deterioration of the machinery, but did say that "we made no progress this weekend" and that the outcome - eighth for him, two places behind Verstappen - was "very disappointing".
