Max Verstappen ‘paid the price’ for changes which made Red Bull F1 car ‘worse’

Max Verstappen says he “paid the price” for set-up changes which made his Red Bull F1 car “worse” in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

The Red Bull driver finished fifth in Baku after a wild end to the race saw Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz take each other out on the penultimate lap, promoting Verstappen up two places.

Verstappen was regularly heard complaining about his Red Bull car throughout the 51-lap grand prix, and was overtaken by his recovering title rival Lando Norris with three laps to go.

“I think we just paid the price with the changes that we made into qualifying. That just made it really difficult to drive,” Verstappen told media including Crash.net.

“The car was jumping around a lot, the wheels were coming off the ground in the corners. When you don’t have a contact patch with the tarmac, it’s very difficult.

“You try to make changes always to make the car better but unfortunately what we did made it worse.

"The overall behaviour is better [with the new floor]. Unfortunately we just made some wrong decisions going into qualifying and we paid the price for it.”

Verstappen insisted it was “not a surprise at all” to see Norris pass him in the closing stages given “everything” in his race was the “worst-case scenario”.

With Norris also picking up the point for setting the fastest lap of the race, the Briton has reduced Verstappen’s championship lead by three points to 59 points.

Asked if he was disappointed to miss an opportunity to build a bigger championship lead over Norris, Verstappen replied: “Yeah but you can also turn it around.

“I think they could have done a better job as well right? So it is what it is”

He added: “Probably positive for me. I would of course liked to extend the gap. But with our race today I’m still happy that it was only that.”