Verstappen feels pole was possible without turbo lag

Max Verstappen believes he could have challenged for pole position had he not encountered a turbo lag issue during British Grand Prix qualifying.

The Red Bull driver qualified fourth on the Silverstone grid and ended up just 0.183s adrift of polesitter Valtteri Bottas’ effort. Following qualifying, he revealed a power issue exiting corners hampered his performance and ultimately cost him further time.

“I honestly didn’t know what to expect in qualifying,” Verstappen said.

“My Friday and also this morning was not good, lacking stability and we managed to find the stability from the car and it was alright.

“I kept having turbo lag coming out of the low speed corners, I had an issue with not the power I wanted to, so it didn’t pick up the throttle like I wanted, so we definitely lost a bit of laptime with that. But still to be that close to pole is good.

“It’s just a shame because we lost a bit of time, otherwise I think we could have fought for pole.”

Asked to explain the issue, Verstappen replied: “It’s where the boost is kicking in. Normally we can [fine-tune it] but somehow today we couldn’t.

“So all the time when you go on the power, some of the corners are low RPM, there’s just a lag.

“You go on throttle and nothing is happening and then you feel it kicking in. You lose performance, especially here.

“After the corners here there are long straights so you continuously lose [time].

“It’s a completely different power unit so there are a lot of benefits but some things are just a bit different so it’s just a bit more fine-tuning but we normally get it right and you turn it around.”

Verstappen feels Red Bull’s impressive display was helped by finding a good compromise between cornering performance and straight-line speed.

“I think this weekend we found a good compromise between cornering and straight-line speed,” he explained.

“If you look at our wing I think we are running a bit less than Mercedes. So we are not too far away on the straights here and somehow our car is working really well through the high-speed corners.

“For some reason last year, even when we trimmed the wing, it was not giving us that extra straight-line performance.”