Max Verstappen says that Red Bull “is simply too slow” at the Bahrain Grand Prix, with the race team to avoid a heavy defeat against the Formula 1 McLaren rival.
Verstappen was eighth in the second training, more than eight tenths slower than McLaren Pacesetter Oscar Piastri.
This continued a Red Bull trend that was not placed in the top six of an FP2 session this season.
Red Bull must have “returned the car upside down” to get back to Pole and the victory in Suzuka last weekend, but the team knows that it will be more difficult in Bahrain with so much tire degradation; Fighting which is a key strength of McLaren this year.
“Yeah, it is simply difficult, took one or two laps to enter it, but the gap was still quite massive,” said Verstappen.
“Not quite happy, he just has a lot of trouble with grip and feeling in general.
“The balance was not too bad but right next to it (the rhythm) and a little work to be done in the long term. Just too slow essentially every turn.
“Honestly, not much fun over there on long races and (even a) a little drift practice at the end.”
This gap was important despite the fact that Red Bull focuses on the soft type race Friday more than usual.
“Yeah, it’s big,” said Verstappen, who started FP2 running soft, from the mclarens gap.
“We made a bit of a different approach from our Friday, so I think this gap is very important.”
Where Red Bull loses
A quick overview of GPS data from the fastest FP2 Tours of Piastri and Verstappen from F1 Tempo points to an obvious weakness RB21 compared to the McLaren.
As you can see in the “Delta”, Verstappen (Blue Line) is able to follow Piastri (orange line) until the Tour du Tour 9/10 delicate.
But thereafter, the Red Bull overheat its tires, and the McLaren stretches its legs through the final sector.
This also has an obvious advantage over a race distance and has echoes of the disturbing race that Norris delivered during pre-season tests which were comfortably clear on Ferrari and Mercedes.
This is what McLaren has already threatened to do in Melbourne before the rain on the day of the race hides things. He more or less controlled the race in China and Suzuka, he lost the position of the track in qualification and there was no high degradation anyway.
Friday’s race seems to support the pre-week fears that Bahrain could be the biggest demonstration to date of the advantage of the McLaren killer tire.
‘Don’t think they showed up’
As you can imagine, McLaren was not carried away with himself, but he clearly had a very solid Friday.
Pacesetter Piastri said he was “happy enough”, after putting the car in a good place in FP2, while Norris called him “strange day because everything is terrible but relatively, I know that our rhythm was still in a reasonable place”.
He called the “horrible” conditions with a “shocking” sensation inside the car. This has made many lessons to test the unrelevant tests.
“We entered this weekend with many of our information from the pre-season test, but it is essentially like launching all of this in the bac and starting again because it is so different,” said Norris.
“We are seconds of what we were doing. Difficult but a good starting point for the weekend, a lot for the team and myself to work.”
When he was submitted to him that McLaren was a few tenths ahead of everyone, he replied: “I don’t think they presented themselves (their engine modes).
“Everyone just looks at the time sheet, they have no idea of the information on who presents himself, who does not do it. It’s (worth) like three or four tenths here.
“It immediately puts us back in the same position as the Mercedes; at the minute, I would not say that we are faster.”
