Max Verstappen says Red Bull’s current reliability record is “unacceptable” after suffering his second retirement in three races at Formula 1’s Australian Grand Prix.
Verstappen was running in second place and trying to stay in touch with race leader Charles Leclerc when he was instructed to pull over at Turn 2 on Lap 39.
The reigning world champion’s non-finish in Melbourne comes after his late stoppage at the season opener in Bahrain, leaving him with a 46-point deficit to Leclerc in the drivers’ standings.
Speaking to Sky Sports, Verstappen insisted Red Bull getting on top of its reliability gremlins was the main priority despite his title prospects already looking bleak.
“We’re already miles behind, so I don’t even want to think about the championship fight at the moment,” Verstappen explained. “I think it’s more important to finish races.
“Today was in general just a bad day again. Not really having the pace, and just managing my tyres to try and just bring it to the end, because it looked like quite an easy P2 anyway.
“I knew I could not fight Charles, so there was no point to try and put pressure on him. But yeah, we didn’t even finish the race. It’s pretty frustrating and unacceptable.”
Red Bull’s mechanics were seen working hard on Verstappen’s car on the grid before the race, with the Dutch driver aware there were pre-race doubts over whether he would make it to the end.
“I knew there was a problem,” he said. “So it was always going to be a question mark of finishing the race. I mean, these kinds of things, if you want to fight for the title, they cannot happen.”
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner understood Verstappen’s frustration, but said the team needed to look into the cause of the issue.
“It is totally understandable his frustration,” Horner said. “That was a really, really disappointing result not to finish the race.
“We don’t know what the issue is yet, but I don’t think it’s actually engine related. I think it might be a fuel issue, but we need to get the car back, we need to be able to look at what’s exactly happened.”
While Red Bull has lost another chunk of points in the constructors’ championship through poor reliability, Horner remains upbeat about the pace the RB18 has shown in the opening rounds.
“I’d rather fix a fast car, than try and make a reliable slow one fast,” he said. “We need to get on top of it. We can’t accept DNFs, but we need to understand what the issue is and we have got to address it.”
Comments.
Loading comments…