Verstappen admits Spa ‘tricky’ to find the balance as he focuses on Sunday's race with looming grid penalty

Max Verstappen’s weekend got off to the best possible start as he topped FP1 by over half a second from his rivals, quickest on both the initial harder tyre runs and on the softs. But he couldn’t get the beating of the McLaren duo in FP2 as the papaya cars nudged ahead – and with a grid penalty looming, the Dutchman knows there is work to do ahead of the weekend.

That grid penalty is for taking on a new ICE, his fifth of the year which will see him take a 10-place drop for Sunday’s Grand Prix. Verstappen took a five-place drop here last year and started sixth, still going on to win the race.

READ MORE: FP2 - Norris tops the second practice times ahead of Piastri and Verstappen in Belgium

But that sort of result is twice as difficult now, as he has both a bigger grid penalty to take and also some much faster rivals to deal with.

Verstappen now hasn’t won a race since Spain, three races ago, and should he fail to win here, he would see his championship advantage further eroded. With the pressure on however, the Dutchman didn’t sound too concerned after the practice sessions on Friday had concluded.

“We tried quite a few things because it’s typically Spa where you have sector one and sector three where you want the top speed but it’s still a very long middle sector where you want cornering speed and it’s still very tricky to find the right balance,” he said afterwards.

“So, we are trying a few things to see what is better and we’ll look at it of course now in the data and analyse. We started out quite positive today, second practice was perhaps not quite as good. We have a few things to look at, you know, with all the changes we made as well and hopefully we can put it all together for the race especially as I know at the moment I have to start a bit back with my penalty for the engine and try to optimise it.

READ MORE: Verstappen and Tsunoda hit with grid penalties at Belgian GP after engine changes

"Naturally you always want a good qualifying but the most important is the race so that’s what we’ll focus on."

With tomorrow’s qualifying set to be wet, anything could happen – and Verstappen will be under pressure to deliver the best possible qualifying position, so his final starting slot isn’t too far back, giving him too much work to do on Sunday.

As for his team mate, Sergio Perez couldn’t quite match Verstappen’s lap times, as he struggled with the balance of his RB20. The Mexican could be heard complaining on the radio about both understeer and oversteer, calling the car difficult to understand.

“We’ve been playing around, we’ve been doing some stuff with it but we just haven’t been able to fully extract everything out of it,” Perez said. “I think we’ve got plenty of information - both cars were quite different, so we have a lot to go through for tomorrow and obviously for the race.”

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A busy night lies ahead for Red Bull with Perez admitting that the “unknowns” heading into tomorrow regarding both the best set-up for his car and the weather are set to make this a very “interesting” weekend.