Max Verstappen admits Red Bull has 'big problems' with "no easy fix" at F1 Japanese GP

Max Verstappen says he doesn’t “expect miracles overnight” after a difficult Friday for his Red Bull Formula 1 team at the Japanese Grand Prix.

In FP1 Verstappen was seventh and 0.791 seconds off the quickest time, and he was 10th and 1.376s off in FP2 having made changes that triggered a very different balance.

His progress in the second session wasn’t helped by an impeding incident with Alpine’s Franco Colapinto, which subsequently went to the stewards.

The four-time world champion admits that Red Bull has to get to the bottom of what wasn’t working with the RB22’s set-up.

“Not very good, to be honest,” said the Dutchman. “Just lacking balance, grip. Two opposites from FP1 to FP2, and yeah, both of them not very good.

“So from our side a lot of work to be done to also understand we’re having kind of big problems at the moment. But not a good day.

“You just try to correct one thing and then you get another one. But never finding a good balance, basically.”

Expanding on the issues he said: “We just struggled a lot more with balance of the car, grip. Similar to China, but we're still off. We’re still not really understanding why we’re that far off in sector one, in basically medium-to-high speed, a lot.

“That’s something that we need to work on. I don’t think it’s an easy fix overnight, but there are a few things that are not going right at the moment.

“I had two opposites today, and the problem is that we never get to get it together basically, you go from one extreme to another extreme, and that is just bleeding, of course, a lot of lap time.”

Asked if he had ideas on what direction to take ahead of qualifying on Saturday he conceded that a solution might take longer.

“Yeah, but at the same time it’s very difficult to solve at the moment, so I don’t expect miracles overnight,” he said. “We just need to understand probably our issues a bit more, where they are coming from.”

He also explained why at one point he was seen moving slowly.

“It’s like an FIA setting, that if you drop too low in rpm, you have no power,” he said.

“It happens sometimes, it mainly happens when you’re driving slowly, and you then try to let another car by who is on a fast lap, and you don’t downshift quick enough, and your RPM then drops too low.

“You go into like a safety mode or whatever, and then it takes like 10,15, 20 seconds before then suddenly you have power again. So it’s just a glitch, or whatever you call it.”

Challenging day despite Red Bull upgrades

Meanwhile RBR’s chief engineer Paul Monaghan agreed that it had been a “challenging day”, and that there is work to be done for Saturday.

"You just have to look at our relative position," he said. "It's not the standards we set ourselves, or those that Max sets us.

“So I think we've identified a few things that are wrong. Now it's case of, can we confirm it? Can we understand it well enough that we can influence it, affect it, cure it, whatever for tomorrow?

“And let's see how tomorrow goes. But yeah today was I'll describe as challenging.”

Red Bull was one of the few teams to bring significant upgrades to Japan, including sidepod, floor and engine cover revisions.

Monaghan noted despite the bigger picture issues the package appears to do what they are supposed to do.

“Geometrically, it's quite a big change,” he said. “So thank you everybody in Milton Keynes for getting here, because that was a mighty effort.

“That, if our grasping of all of today's fun [is correct], is behaving, but there are some other aspects of the car that are currently not very happy. And those are the ones we have got to try and correct for tomorrow.”