29 February 2024 , 12:28
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Max Verstappen was left fuming with his Red Bull team in the early stages of the first practice session of the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Verstappen had gone top of the timesheet on the medium tyres, putting in a lap that was 0.084 seconds quicker than team-mate Sergio Perez. Despite that though, Verstappen clearly was not happen with his car's set-up, going on team radio to say: "Everything is s***, like miles off."
The first practice session in Sakhir was hit by very windy conditions, with several drivers locking up or being caught out as they pounded round the track. Sky Sports reported that Verstappen came into the pits after his message, with Red Bull mechanics making a tweak to the angle of his front wing.
The Dutchman was then sent back out on the track, but the change did not appear to solve the problem. He was soon back on the radio, saying: "Still very bad downshifts and upshifts. Car is literally jumping."
The champion's race engineer replied to say: "OK thank you, we'll see if we can sort that out in the garage." After a delay, Verstappen was sent back out on track, though was again back on the radio offering more complaints about the car's set-up.
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Though he was complaining, former F1 star Karun Chandhok hinted that Verstappen may have been playing mindgames with his rivals. Chandhok told Sky Sports: "I think that's just a psychological message he's sending to his opposition."
Bahrain is the opening race of the season and comes less than a week after the end of pre-season testing, which also took place at the Middle East track. Following the completion of testing, Verstappen insisted he was happy with his new car, having won the last three world championships in succession.
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Verstappen was frequently unhappy with the set-up of his car (Clive Mason/Getty Images)“Today we made the plan to not focus on pure lap time. I think it was more important just to get the long running done and then get a bit more of an understanding of the car, so we focused on that programme and to be honest I think it all looked quite positive," the Dutchman said.
“[I’m] quite happy with the car, how it was behaving, and then when we head into the race weekend it’s about fine-tuning the balance around the circumstances that you face throughout that weekend. I just look at what we are doing here.
“I think there’s of course always a lot of work to do – you always want to do better, but I think we had a very positive test and we learned a lot from every single thing that we changed on the car, and we also know what we want to do for next week, and that’s what we’ll focus on.
“Honestly, I trust everyone in the team that they know what they are doing, so I don’t care how they design the car as long as it’s faster. Of course it’s always quite interesting what they come up with every single time, and it looks nice.
“For the rest, I’m not an engineer. I’m here to do my job in the car and they are here to do their job building the car and preparing it. I think so far everything that we hoped for worked very well, and that’s always a little bit of a question mark when you get to the real track, but I have to say [in] the last few years already I think that has been a good strength of ours.”