Max Verstappen didn’t even bother turning up for the first hour of Monza practice, and by the time he did, he probably wished he’d stayed in the motorhome. Red Bull’s Friday at the Temple of Speed was a mess of low-speed grip complaints, braking gripes and a balance problem that technical director Pierre Wache admits nobody has quite worked out how to fix.
A Rookie Session and a Reality Check
Verstappen handed his RB22 to rookie Ayumu Iwasa for FP1, part of Red Bull’s mandatory rookie outing rather than any grand strategic gesture. Iwasa got through the session cleanly enough, while Verstappen watched from the pit wall. Harmless enough on paper. Less harmless when you realise it meant Verstappen’s first proper lap of the weekend in his own car came in FP2, on a track where every tenth matters and Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren have all found room to breathe.
Wache didn’t dress it up. “What doesn’t help is when Max is not driving during P1, and he jumps in the car there [for FP2], and we have less time to react. Now, we have to react for P3. That’s the main thing,” he said, as reported by Crash.net. Translation for the rest of us: Red Bull handed itself a self-inflicted handicap on a weekend it could least afford one.
Ninth Place and a Growing Gap
When Verstappen did climb in for FP2, the result was ugly. He ended the session ninth, nearly a second off pace-setter George Russell, who topped a Mercedes-Ferrari-Mercedes top three ahead of Charles Leclerc and Kimi Antonelli. Verstappen wasn’t just beaten by the front-runners either; he was slower than Arvid Lindblad’s Racing Bull and Oliver Bearman’s Haas, which is the sort of stat that tends to end up on a whiteboard in a debrief room with a red circle around it.
Wache summed up the diagnosis in blunt terms. “I think clearly we have a balance issue on the car, is the main thing,” he said. “A little bit like Zandvoort, to be honest. We’re trying to understand what the issue is, try to fix it in a different way by set-up and car components. But it’s a main thing we are working on.”
Zandvoort, for those keeping score, was a weekend Red Bull would rather forget entirely, so hearing it invoked as a comparison at Monza is not exactly a vote of confidence. This is a team that keeps insisting it’s working on it, race after race, while the gap to the front doesn’t shrink.
Verstappen’s Own Verdict
Verstappen wasn’t shy about his own frustrations either. He struggled to find the right balance through the corners and said as much afterwards, pointing to work still needed before qualifying. He also conceded that the gap to Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren remains substantial, and that closing it meaningfully by Saturday looks unlikely, though he held out hope of shaving something off over a single lap and finding more in race pace.
None of that should shock anyone who has watched Red Bull’s season unfold. Verstappen sits sixth in the drivers’ standings on 112 points, some way adrift of a Mercedes driver in Kimi Antonelli, who leads on 242. Red Bull as a constructor is fourth, comfortably behind Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren, and Monza’s power-hungry layout was never going to flatter a car that already trails on the electrical side of its power unit, even with the FIA reconfirming Red Bull’s engine has the strongest internal combustion element on the grid.
Energy Management Excuses Get Short Shrift
Iwasa, for his part, reported struggles with energy deployment during a qualifying simulation in FP1, the sort of comment that could easily be spun into a bigger story about Red Bull’s power unit woes heading into Sunday. Wache wasn’t having it. “It should not be [a concern],” he said. “I think it’s why free practice is there, to try to highlight the issue and try to, after that, fix it. But yeah, I think it’s a normal weekend on that aspect. After, for Max, the main concern for me is the balance.”
Asked whether the litany of problems traced back to new upgrades brought to Monza, Wache batted that away too, insisting it was simply a matter of evaluating components and making choices between them. Which is a fairly tidy way of saying the car isn’t broken, it’s just not very good right now, and Red Bull needs to pick which flavour of “not very good” it wants to race with on Sunday.
A New Voice on the Radio
Adding a layer of intrigue to an already scratchy day, Tom Hart stepped in as Verstappen’s race engineer during FP2, taking over from Gianpiero Lambiase as part of a planned handover. Hart is being eased into the role ahead of a permanent switch, with Lambiase set to leave Red Bull for McLaren as Chief Racing Officer. Hart has history with Verstappen from his years as a performance engineer around the team, which made him the logical internal candidate once Red Bull persuaded him to stay rather than join Williams as Alexander Albon’s engineer from 2027.
It was, in other words, an odd session for Hart to get his first real taste of race-day radio duty: a car with a balance problem, a driver who’d missed the first hour entirely, and a frustrated four-time champion looking for answers that weren’t immediately available. If Hart wanted a baptism of fire, Monza obliged.
Little Time to Fix It
Red Bull now has FP3 on Saturday at 10:30 UTC to find something, before qualifying at 14:00 UTC, check the calendar for your local time. That’s not much runway to solve a balance issue Wache himself likens to Zandvoort, one of the low points of Red Bull’s season. Losing FP1 to a mandatory rookie outing might be standard practice elsewhere on the grid, but on a weekend this tight, it looks like a luxury Red Bull could not afford to give itself.
Monza was never going to be Red Bull’s happiest hunting ground given the power demands, but turning up a session light and still finishing behind a Haas and a Racing Bull is the kind of Friday that raises real questions rather than just talking points. Saturday needs to look very different, or this weekend risks becoming another one Red Bull would rather not discuss afterwards.
