Lewis Hamilton hit with penalty in blow to Hungarian GP hopes

Over the past two seasons the Red Bull cars have had their issues, but Verstappen has generally been able to drive around them. Enough at least to win the 2024 title and push Norris to a final-round decider in 2025 with a strong finish to the season.

In 2026, there has been almost nothing to celebrate and frustration after frustration. There is little hope on offer heading into the summer break at the halfway point of a thoroughly trying season.

“For me, the whole qualifying session just went awful. We’ve been losing downforce on the car ever since FP3, and that just kept happening through qualifying, too. It’s just completely rubbish,” Verstappen added.

“There’s always something else that stops working or breaks down… I don’t know… I’m just fed up with it for now.

“They can see something went wrong again with the aero, that we lost downforce again, the car is just totally undriveable. If you take off wing, you get understeer; if you add wing, it just snaps. It’s simply impossible.”

Verstappen was not the only one to end the session with reason to be in a foul mood. His spin brought out yellow flags that compromised the final laps of the championship-contending Mercedes cars of Antonelli and George Russell.

For the first time this year there is not a Mercedes on pole position for a grand prix. Both Antonelli, who was again the quicker man, and Russell admit they were not in contention throughout the session, but that more would have been possible without the yellow flag.

Russell’s session ended with another mechanical issue as he was told to pull up on the pit straight at the end of Q3 because of a water leak. He was, though, a little more upbeat about making progress in the race.

“We were probably even further [away] yesterday, but we had the strongest race pace, which tends to say it’s not a car problem but a tyre problem,” he said. “Time will tell tomorrow if we struck the right balance between the qualifying setup and race set-up.

“We probably know we could make the car faster in qualifying trim at the expense of race performance. Time will tell tomorrow if we make that right balance. It’s going to be difficult to overtake. It would have been nice to be higher up.”