What’s making Red Bull ‘completely undriveable’ at Chinese GP

Max Verstappen declared “every lap is like survival” in Red Bull’s Formula 1 car in an emphatic takedown of its performance at the Chinese Grand Prix after qualifying.

Verstappen had already labelled Friday a “disaster” over the radio, but that turned out to just be a warm-up for a blunt appraisal of Red Bull’s Shanghai weekend after a bitterly disappointing Saturday.

His sprint race was wrecked as soon as it started, thanks to a lack of engine power off the line dropping him several places, so he failed to score even a single point. Then, Red Bull was a midfield Q3 car again in qualifying.

That was almost a carbon-copy of Friday’s session in terms of result with Verstappen eighth and Isack Hadjar ninth – both beaten by Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and fighting Ollie Bearman’s Haas. The gap to the front was cut by four tenths, but they were still the better part of a second off the pace, so that was as much of a silver lining as was offered.

“We changed a lot on the car to make zero difference,” Verstappen said.

“So the whole weekend we’ve been off. The car is completely undriveable. I cannot even put a bit of a reference in.

“Every lap is like survival.”

After Hadjar qualified on the second row in Australia a week ago – when Verstappen crashed out of qualifying – this has been a sudden bump down to earth for Red Bull, which is unexpectedly suffering much more from chassis limitations than its new in-house engine.

It is not one or the other, of course. One theory is that the Red Bull engine is particularly efficient with its energy harvesting and that makes it relatively more potent on tracks like Melbourne, where recharging opportunities are limited. But if it has a lower overall peak, then coming to Shanghai – where recharging is easy and it is more about total deployment over the lap – then a deficit seems to emerge.

However, the car is the primary issue. Verstappen made that plainly clear.

“I cannot push at all because the car doesn’t let me,” he said.

“That’s why I don’t really feel in control of the car. It’s not how it should be.”

Verstappen lamented a limitation with “everything at the moment, oversteer and understeer”, as this weekend ensured his ire at F1 2026 moved away from the new engines and their energy management demands to a more holistic frustration: “From lap one of this new regulation, I’ve not enjoyed this car, for sure.”

His comments in TV interviews were similar. “Turned it upside down, it was exactly the same”; “I’m not enjoying it at all”; “There’s no balance – I cannot lean on the car. Every lap is a fight.”

And there was a pertinent nod to last year, and even 2024, when Verstappen said: “In the past, sometimes we would throw it upside down and it would work.”

It hasn’t worked here. Red Bull has made no progress at all in understanding, let alone fixing, why it has had no grip since the first lap of FP1. Its chief suspicion is it is temperature-related but that is about as far as it goes and Hadjar suggested the track layout was more exposing limitations with the car itself.

“We are on the edge of what we have as a package,” Hadjar said.

“We’re grip limited now. We just need more load everywhere.”

For things to not get even worse, Verstappen needs to avoid a repeat of the sprint race start on Sunday. He said he suffered the same fate as Liam Lawson in the sister Racing Bulls team a week ago with the car just bogging down by not producing the engine power expected – but Verstappen did not know why, only enquiring if it would be resolved.

“Honestly, I didn’t even ask,” he said when The Race asked about his start problem.

“They said they would fix it. So I hope that that will be fixed for tomorrow.

“It helps a bit to stay in position instead of starting a race with P20! Realistically, that’s anyway where we are fighting, P7, P8.”

He added: “It’s not going to be a fun race.”

Team boss Laurent Mekies said Red Bull has made “a little bit of progress to close the gap in terms of performance, but it’s of course not enough and not something we can be happy with”.

He believes it’s important Red Bull “completes our understanding during the race tomorrow of why it has been more difficult for us this weekend compared to Melbourne”.