Verstappen not concerned by Red Bull’s lack of F1 running

Max Verstappen is remaining upbeat about Red Bull’s chances in 2018 despite a lack of running during the first week of Formula 1 pre-season testing at Barcelona. 

Red Bull made a positive start to proceedings as Daniel Ricciardo topped the opening day of the first test on Monday, before Verstappen was left garage-bound for much of Tuesday morning with what the Milton Keynes-based outfit described as a “minor fuel leak”. 

Back behind the wheel of the RB14 following Wednesday’s wash-out, the Dutchman barely featured on Thursday morning during mixed conditions and later beached his Red Bull in the gravel, with Verstappen at a loss to explain how the spin had occurred. 

“I had a little moment myself, lucky I didn’t touch anything, so I just wanted to reverse in the gravel and suddenly I got stuck,” Verstappen said. “We have to investigate exactly what happened, but that was the end of the day.”

Despite Red Bull only managing a total of 209 laps across the first week of winter testing - the third lowest mileage completed by any team - Verstappen insisted he had seen plenty of positives from his new-for-2018 challenger to remain confident heading into the second test. 

"[There are] no question marks. We had some little hiccups, but that can happen. You don’t want it to happen, but sometimes it can. Anyway the conditions the whole week actually have not been great.

“It is a big difference the way the car is handling, it is in a positive way. Today we didn’t do any performance work, but sometimes when you have conditions like that that are not ideal, it is good just try and make sure that everything is working well in terms of the data you get from the car compared to what is happening in the wind tunnel. 

“Looking at lap times now doesn’t make sense; anyway this track with the new surface it takes a long time before you actually get a lap time out of it. And we have only done runs of like two laps. So I am not too worried yet. 

“You know that Mercedes and Ferrari are really strong anyway. But I am quite happy with the car so far, so the second week maybe we will show a bit more how we are comparing against the rest of the teams.”