Max Verstappen arrived at his home race with a championship lead that stretched roughly as far as the journey from Spa-Francorchamps to Zandvoort, and with apparently unstoppable momentum from a hat-trick of wins.
With the last two of those wins coming from 10th and 14th on the grid, his orange army could be forgiven for expecting the world champion would put on another clinic in his own back garden and cruise to a comfortable victory.
But after two hours of running on Friday, Red Bull’s lack of pace meant there were a few disquieted Dutch fans leaving the circuit at the end of the opening day.
Verstappen’s morning session lasted barely 10 minutes before he pulled off the track with a suspected gearbox problem, possibly the legacy of a repair Red Bull made to his unit before the session began. When he eventually got a full hour of running in in the afternoon, he could do no better than eighth – not only almost seven tenths off Charles Leclerc’s quickest time of the day for Ferrari, but lagging behind Fernando Alonso’s Alpine and even Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin.
Behind the wheel, it was not a shock for Verstappen to see the time delta on his dashboard showing how much of a deficit he had to the Ferraris. “To be honest, while driving it I was not really surprised when I saw the lap time difference,” he said after the session.
Verstappen explained that the loss of track time had played a large role in the margin to the Ferraris – by far his largest on a dry Friday across the season so far.
“[It was] just missing out in FP1 on the soft tyre,” he said. “I think on that hard tyre you couldn’t really tell the balance, because we had such little grip on the tyre.
“Then you’re a session behind, so we went into FP2 and the balance wasn’t great. But, in an hour session, you can’t really change the car a lot. So we just tried to deal with what we had and that wasn’t great today. But we’ll have the night to look into things. And for sure we can do better than this.”
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Verstappen’s performance alone could be dismissed as being ‘one of those days’ for Red Bull if it was not for the fact his team mate Sergio Perez was even further back from their rivals – almost a second slower than Mercedes in first practice and even further away in the second. However Perez had a more conventional explanation for why he had not been further up…
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