The damage which cost Max Verstappen a potential victory in the British Grand Prix was caused by debris from a collision between the drivers of Red Bull’s junior team.
Yuki Tsunoda and Pierre Gasly collided, leaving debris on the circuit which Verstappen hit shortly afterwards. He initially thought he’d picked up a puncture and came into the pits.
“There was no puncture,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner explained. “It was so bad, it felt like a puncture.
“Basically on lap 11 he hit a piece of debris which was an AlphaTauri part, from the incident that they had. So he’s then done the race with a modified floor, with a piece of an AlphaTauri endplate stuck under the bottom of the car.”
The damage caused “a massive loss of downforce” on Verstappen’s car, said Horner. “Then of course you rely on looking at trying to identify what’s causing it. And of course, because it was underneath there was nothing obvious – it wasn’t like half the floor was hanging off.
“So it was difficult to actually understand it initially, which was why Max reported a puncture, but it was actually a major update that had gone on.”
Verstappen’s race was “going fine” until he picked up the damage, said Horner. “You could see that he was quicker than certainly Carlos and he was just not wanting to take too much out of the tyre too early and worked his way up to the back of him, made the pass.
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“Then unfortunately literally one lap later he hit the debris. So then he reported a puncture, but we couldn’t see it on the data, but then [you’ve] got to trust the driver, obviously.
“So we pitted precautionarily and then we saw that there were some debris. In fact, Carlos Sainz, I think, said when he was following bits were coming out from the bottom of Max’s car.”
Horner praised Verstappen’s effort at the end of the race to salvage seventh place after he was able to fit a fresh set of tyres during a Safety Car period.
“On the medium tyre, he was obviously fighting as hard as he could, but suddenly your race becomes very focussed on suddenly the cars that you’re racing against, which were more Alpine and Aston at that stage.
“So we then pitted for the hard tyre to get to the end of the race as we felt that was our best way of finishing P7. He struggled I think particularly with the wounded car on the harder compound of tyre even more.
“So when we got to the Safety Car, we’ve got…
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