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Verstappen explains what caused ‘big moment’ in Abu Dhabi qualifying
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Max Verstappen has explained what caused his dramatic slide during the final segment of qualifying in Abu Dhabi, with the world champion admitting that he expects McLaren to be “very hard to beat” come race day as he lines up in P5 on the grid.
After looking fast in the initial stages of Q3, Verstappen put his Red Bull into provisional pole on the first runs – but en route suffered quite a moment at the last turn, resulting in him very nearly losing the car.
It was Lando Norris who went on to set the pace in the final laps, with Verstappen ending up in fifth place behind the Haas of Nico Hulkenberg in fourth, though the German was later hit with a three-place grid drop for the race. Asked later on for his feelings on the session, the 27-year-old said: “How do I feel? In a way relieved, because it’s the final qualifying of the year!
“The qualifying itself, I think it was quite decent but you never really had a good [comparison] because many people kept on aborting on their new tyres, so every time when I was P1 people were on scrubbed [tyres] and I don’t think that of course gave a fair performance assessment, even though I think even if I didn’t drop it in the last corner I think I could have fought for second, but that’s not how it works in Formula 1.
2024 Abu Dhabi GP Qualifying: Verstappen has huge slide out of the final corner in Q3
“It just highlights also with our season with the car, it was very hard to make it work. If it works it’s good, but today I was still not very happy with the overall balance and when you really have to push to the limit, the car just becomes very peaky and that’s why I had that big moment. Probably looks good as a slide because it’s not fast but, yeah, we have to deal with that.”
In terms of whether he expects to be able to move forwards during the race – or if it could be difficult to manage the RB20 – Verstappen added: “I hope that I can at least fight Nico in front of me. Normally we should, but they’ve been really quick all weekend.
“From our side all I can do is just be with the Ferraris. I don’t know with the McLarens, they looked solid all weekend so they will be very hard to beat.”
Elsewhere at Red Bull, Sergio Perez will start from P10. It was an eventful start to the session for the Mexican, who at one stage went quickest before seeing his lap time deleted for exceeding track limits – only for it to then be reinstated again.
Perez frustrated after track limits call costs him an extra set of tyres
Despite regaining the time and going on to progress to Q3, Perez was left to rue the impact of the incident.
“It was a little bit of a shame that we ended up losing that lap because that meant that we had to put an extra set of tyres [on], and that was a little bit of a compromise that we had to do,” he explained after qualifying.
With the event coming at a time where much speculation surrounds Perez’s future, the 34-year-old was quizzed on whether this was adding any further pressure for his race.
“The main thing is to focus on tomorrow, try to get a strong race and that’s the main target,” Perez responded.
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