Max Verstappen was initially frustrated with his 2022 car, the Red Bull racer has revealed.
The Dutchman's 2022 season will be remembered for just how dominant he was on the way to winning the championship. Both he and Red Bull secured their titles in eye-catching fashion with massive leads over their nearest rivals.
But, considering how the year ended, it is easy to forget that things weren't all smooth sailing for them at the start. They began with a double DNF in Bahrain while Verstappen also failed to finish the third race in Australia, as reliability issues took their toll.
Those gremlins were not the only thing troubling Verstappen about his car. In a new interview, the double world champion has opened up on the many problems he had with his RB18 in the early stages of the season, including its hefty weight and cornering difficulties – very much taking it out of his preferred setup.
He told Autosport : "Well, now it was just related to the weight of the car. Being really overweight created an understeering balance and once we started to get rid of that, it started to be more agile again. Not just twitchy but more agile.
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"You could really use the front end. At the end of the day, that's also how you really drive a fast car. A car cannot be fast with understeer. It's impossible, especially with the tyres we had this year being a bit more understeer limited as well. You cannot have a car like that.
Verstappen's title defence suffered from some early season reliability issues (AFP via Getty Images)"To be honest, most of [the problems] came from the weight, but also the updates we did to the car [helped]. [It was about] trying to learn the tyres, trying to really understand how we can preserve them better, which hasn't been the easiest for sure."
In the end, those issued left Verstappen feeling "a bit surprised" by the way he was able to pull away from his closest rival Charles Leclerc in the standings. As Red Bull got over their issues, Ferrari suffered from their own and their championship challenge collapsed, leaving Verstappen with no real rivals in the title race.
"If you look at how close the cars were, it's a bit surprising to have such a big gap anyway. There weren't many weekends in which we were really dominant," he added. "But I mean, at the end, I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out, especially after the season I had last year [2021]. It's not always good to have that kind of fight every single year."
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