Verstappen: How can it be this bad?

The four-time World Champion, along with his Red Bull teammate Yuki Tsunoda, has looked out of sorts all weekend long, struggling with the drivability of his RB21 car.

He could only muster a lowly P6 in Sprint Qualifying, although he managed to gain a couple of places and cross the line in fourth place at the subsequent Sprint race earlier on Saturday.

Verstappen complained of poor ride quality behind the wheel during the Sprint, stating that he was bouncing all over the place and in "no man's land".

Unfortunately, things went from bad to worse for the defending Champion. Red Bull made several drastic changes to his car to improve the ride quality; this worked but had the ill effect of lowering grip levels even more.

The result was that Verstappen was knocked out in Q1 for the first time since the 2021 Russian Grand Prix, and the first time ever in his career on pure pace. He was asked to share his thoughts immediately after Q1.

Verstappen claimed that a lack of confidence in his RB21's abilities was the main reason for his premature exit from Qualifying.

He said: "It was just bad. I couldn’t push at all. The car was all over the place, sliding around a lot. I had to under-drive it a lot just to not have a moment. That of course doesn’t work in qualifying.

"We first have to analyse what is going on. I don’t really understand how it can be this bad, so that’s more important for us to understand at the moment," stated the Red Bull driver.

Red Bull Team Principal Laurent Mekies went into a little bit more detail about what exactly went wrong, admitting that some of the setup changes made may have had an adverse effect on the car's handling.

He added: "Obviously nobody expected something like that. We have been unhappy with the car pretty much since we got here. Nonetheless we were at the point where we could not fight for the win but we could fight with the group just after.

"It's fair to say we took some risk before qualifying to try to see if we could put the car in a better place and it obviously went in the opposite direction.

"It's sometimes the price you pay when you take a risk," concluded the Red Bull boss.

Can Verstappen salvage some points come race day? The Grand Prix commences on Sunday 9 November at 17:00 GMT (14:00 local time).