Red Bull’s damning ‘same pace as Colapinto’ verdict with ‘nothing working’ in Singapore

Max Verstappen explains to Christian Horner and Helmut Marko

Eighth and P15 in Singapore practice, Helmut Marko says Red Bull “can’t accept” that performance especially as they were on the “same pace” as Williams rookie Franco Colapinto.

Although Red Bull won the 2022 Singapore Grand Prix with Sergio Perez, last season they suffered on the street circuit to record their heaviest loss of the championship.

Red Bull: We are on the same pace as Colapinto

This season the situation isn’t looking much better.

Perez was the best-placed Red Bull driver after Friday night’s FP2 in eighth place where he was almost nine-tenths of a second down on the pace-setting Lando Norris with Max Verstappen a further four-tenths down in 15th place.

Verstappen, who has not won in seven races, summed up his day by calling it “difficult”.

He added: “We didn’t have the grip that we would have liked on the tyres, so I felt like we were sliding a lot more than usual. This caused us particular issues in FP2, which wasn’t really a positive session for us.

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“We haven’t so much been struggling with the bumps and the kerbs, but it was more about the general grip of the tyres. We are going to have to go back and analyse the data and see what we can do to optimise the performance with the car and the tyres so we can improve ahead of qualifying.”

Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko stopped short of calling it a disaster for Verstappen.

“On Max’s car, nothing is working,” he told the German media. “On both the soft and the hard tyre he doesn’t get any grip and he doesn’t have any balance at all.

“At the moment I would say it is very worrying. For sure we have to try something drastically now. Let’s see what we can try.”

But what seemed to irk Marko the most was that Verstappen was on the same pace as Williams rookie Colapinto, who was 0.034s slower than the World Champion on Friday.

“We can’t accept that,” he said. “We have to sort things out to make sure that we are more competitive. I just watched and we are on the same pace as Colapinto.”

As for team boss Christian Horner’s verdict after Friday’s running, he told Auto Motor und Sport : “We could not get the tyres up to temperature. Max succeeded even less than Checo. Maybe because he had a bit less downforce.

“We tried many things, but nothing helped. There is still a lot of work to do.”

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