Verstappen ninth at Monza: Red Bull knows what is wrong
Verstappen ended FP2 ninth, 0.818s off the pace, behind a Racing Bulls and a Haas — and Red Bull's technical director is not hiding from it.
Max Verstappen ended second practice at Monza ninth, 0.818 seconds off George Russell’s 1:22.559. That gap is not the worrying part. The worrying part is that Red Bull already knows what is causing it, and fixing it is not a matter of turning a wing flap.
Both Red Bulls behind a Haas and a Racing Bulls
Verstappen was beaten by Arvid Lindblad in a Racing Bulls, seventh, and by Oliver Bearman in a Haas, eighth. In the second Red Bull, Liam Lawson, standing in for the absent Isack Hadjar, was twelfth.
Monza was supposed to be kinder than Zandvoort. It is a power circuit with almost no cornering, the sort of layout that flatters a strong engine and forgives a car that struggles to rotate. Instead both Red Bulls finished the afternoon behind cars they would normally lap in traffic without noticing.
Wache: we clearly have a balance issue
Technical director Pierre Wache did not reach for the usual Friday vocabulary about long-run programmes and unrepresentative fuel loads.
“I think that clearly we have a balance issue on the car, that is the main thing,” he said when asked about Verstappen’s radio complaints, which centred on a lack of grip at the rear of the RB22.
He then made the comparison that will worry Red Bull most: “It’s a little bit like Zandvoort, to be honest, and we try to understand what the issue is.”
Zandvoort is a circuit of long, loaded corners. Monza has essentially none. A problem that shows up at both is not a circuit characteristic. It is the car.
Iwasa found the same thing in the morning
The most useful evidence came from the driver who was not complaining.
Verstappen sat out first practice, with Ayumu Iwasa in the car for one of the rookie outings every team has to give up during the season. Iwasa reported that the RB22 was acceptable at low speed but became tricky at high speed, describing a disconnected car balance. He also flagged energy management problems during his preparation laps, which under the current rules is where a large part of a Monza lap is won or lost. Our ERS explainer sets out why.
Two drivers, two sessions, the same diagnosis. That rules out a one-off, a kerb strike or a bad setup call on one car.
It also cost Red Bull something. “It doesn’t help when Max is not driving during FP1 and jumps in the car for FP2,” Wache said. Every team owes those sessions, but handing one over on a weekend when the car has a problem means the driver who has to solve it gets half the running to do it in.
Eight tenths, and one night to find them
Red Bull is not starting from nothing. Wache says the components to try are already on the shelf.
“We will evaluate some components and afterwards we have some choices to make between different components,” he said, referring to parts the team has carried for several races without committing to them.
That is a real option and a real risk. Choosing between existing components overnight means Red Bull will arrive at qualifying having changed the car without a session to check the change. At Monza there is no third practice cushion of the sort a driver would want before a low-downforce qualifying run.
Wache was asked whether he was confident. His answer was characteristically flat: “I’m never confident, otherwise you will never achieve anything.” And on the purpose of a Friday like this one: “I think it’s why the free practice is there, to try and highlight the issue and then to fix it after that.”
Saturday is where Red Bull usually answers
None of this means Verstappen is out of it, and anyone who has watched this team turn a scrappy Friday into a front-row Saturday knows why.
But the arithmetic is unfriendly. Eight tenths at Monza is an enormous amount of lap time, because the circuit gives you so few places to find it. There are no long corners to attack, no sequence where a driver can lean on the front axle and take back three tenths. There is a straight, a chicane, and the tow.
And the tow is the other problem. Ferrari has already worked out how it wants to use the slipstream between its two cars, and Mercedes has both cars in the top three. A team that arrives in Q3 with a balance it does not trust is not well placed to play that game.
What Saturday will show
Three things. Whether the component change moves Verstappen’s rear grip complaint or simply trades it for a different one. Whether Lawson’s twelfth was the car or the situation, because that answer matters for Red Bull’s own driver decisions. And where Verstappen qualifies relative to Antonelli, who takes a grid penalty here anyway, because the two of them may end up recovering through the same traffic on Sunday.
We are covering qualifying and the race as they happen in the RNT-Motorsports live blog.
