Max Verstappen, Red Bull, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 2026

A frustrated Max Verstappen told his team “there’s something really wrong” with his car as he qualified sixth for the Canadian Grand Prix.

Verstappen complained about “massive lag” and poor straight-line speed early in the session. However the car’s balance was a greater concern. He told race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase early on that “I can’t get my front tyres in the window, it’s really bad.”

Verstappen ended Q1 and Q2 behind his team mate Isack Hadjar. He beat his team mate to sixth on the grid by 0.028 seconds but was over three tenths of a second slower than pole-winner George Russell.

Before his final run Verstappen repeated his complaint about his car’s balance, telling Lambiase: “There’s something fucked. Like this is impossible. It’s impossible. What the fuck’s going on here?”

After finishing the session Verstappen told the team: “There’s something really wrong that we need to check guys, it’s not possible.”

Verstappen said afterwards he did not know why his car’s balance had felt so poor. “I don’t know,” he told Sky. “That’s the honest answer. I have no idea what’s going on.

“Everything is so confusing and the set-up change that we made I also didn’t like. It was very difficult.”

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Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies came on Verstappen’s radio to apologise at the end of the session, telling him: “Sorry Max, we know it’s a frustrating one, but we’ll have a look to answer it. It’s a painful but necessary data point and we’ll look into it.”

According to Mekies the team experimented with different tyre preparation laps on Verstappen’s car which may have contributed to his problems.

“It’s been tricky to get the front tyre to work here [over] one lap,” said Mekies, “to the extent that we started to do build laps only in qualifying – we had not done that so far in the weekend.

“It was working pretty okay with Isack. It was not really working the way we wanted with Max, so on his last attempt, we decided with him to [revert] to a push-cool-push.”

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2026 Canadian Grand Prix

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Keith Collantine

Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 – when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring journalist, Keith began running the site full-time in 2010, achieving a long-held ambition to dedicate his full attention to his passion for motor racing. View all posts by Keith Collantine