Verstappen: I had no grip at all on this set. Shocking!

Red Bull's triple world champion has a healthy 70-point lead with nine races remaining, but that would be trimmed considerably if McLaren's Norris wins and Verstappen fails to move up from his grid position. The Dutchman left lamenting over the radio during Q3 at Monza on Saturday: "I had no grip at all on this set. Shocking!"

When asked after qualifying at Monza whether he could still win, Verstappen replied, "Normally not. I mean, the whole weekend already we were too slow; the long runs might look good on paper, but it didn't really feel like that personally.

"Maybe with how the car is at the moment it might be a little bit better for the race, but we're also standing at the back of, let's say, the top group, so we just have to wait and see what happens in front of us," said Verstappen, who won the last two editions of the Italian Grand Prix.

Verstappen also has a strong track record of winning from well down the grid and can never be ruled out. Furthermore, Verstappen has not won any of the last five races, his longest losing run since 2020 and before he had clinched his first championship.

Norris has been on pole in three of the last four races and won Verstappen's home race in the Netherlands from the top slot last weekend.

Verstappen explained: "Our car is extremely tricky to drive from entry to mid-corner; it's a massive balance shift at the moment, so if you fix one thing, it creates another problem, so we have to be quite careful with that as well.

"For whatever reason in Q3, I picked up a lot of understeer on both tire sets, and this is something that I don't understand at the moment; I mean, it was just not drivable anymore; I couldn't attack any corner. So that's something that is very weird; I mean, going four-tenths slower than what you did in Q2 is not normal."

The reinging World Champ's predicament compares starkly with last season, when he won 19 of 22 races. He also started this year with seven poles in a row, but rivals have caught up as Red Bull's form has dropped off.