Max Verstappen was visibly furious when he crossed the finishing line at the end of his final qualifying lap at the Hungaroring, punching his steering wheel as he fell short of displacing the McLaren drivers from the front row of the grid by a gallingly narrow margin.
Five hundredths of a second was all Verstappen needed to take pole position for himself. Three would have put him in the position Oscar Piastri won the race from. Either might have resulted in a very different outcome to the race.
Instead, as Verstappen took the chequered flag, he knew he faced a tough race. Afterwards he admitted his “frustration”, which Red Bull’s motorsport consultant Helmut Marko said was partly because the team’s latest upgrades turned out to be less effective than they had hoped.
“We missed pole position with Max by just 46 thousandths of a second, which annoyed Verstappen a lot because he had hoped that the improvements to the car would put us two tenths ahead of the competition,” he told Red Bull-owned publication Speed Week. “That wasn’t the case.”
There was another factor in Verstappen’s irritation, however, as he revealed after taking the chequered flag. “Also, doesn’t help I had a fucking car again in the second-last corner,” he told race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase.
“Yes, it was exactly the same as the previous run,” Lambiase noted.
Not only were the two situations identical, they also involved the same car: The McLaren of Verstappen’s championship rival Lando Norris. Verstappen encountered the MCL38 between the final two corners each time.
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Norris was careful not to impede Verstappen and the stewards did not investigate him for doing so. The McLaren’s position probably only required Verstappen to make a slight adjustment to his line as he swung from the right-hand side of the track to the left.
Nonetheless it appeared McLaren timed both of Norris’ runs in Q3 to coincide with Verstappen’s. This may not have been solely to distract him: By following the Red Bull through the last corner, Norris could gain the benefit of a brief slipstream as they joined the start-finish straight.
Red Bull, however, believe it also cost Verstappen a fractional amount of time which could have made the difference between pole position and third on the grid. “It could just as easily have…
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