What held Red Bull back from achieving a good result in Shanghai Sprint qualifying?

Red Bull endured a fairly challenging qualifying day on the opening day of the Chinese Grand Prix, with both Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar lacking the pace to fight near the front during Sprint Qualifying at the Shanghai International Circuit.

Despite both drivers scraping into SQ3, neither was able to mount a serious challenge for the top positions, leaving the team searching for answers ahead of Saturday’s Sprint.

Verstappen, who ultimately qualified eighth, was visibly frustrated by the RB22’s behaviour throughout the day. The Dutchman attempted two push laps in the final segment, but neither run delivered the performance he needed. After the chequered flag, Red Bull even apologised to him over the radio for the lack of competitiveness.

“The whole day hasn’t been great pace wise,” Verstappen admitted afterwards. “We have had low grip, which has been our biggest problem, and no balance unfortunately. We are losing quite a lot of time in the corners and then, of course, this starts to trigger other little problems.

"The big problem for us is the cornering. We will need to go away and analyse what we can do ahead of tomorrow and figure out our main limitations and we will see how we go.”

Hadjar, meanwhile, took some encouragement from his own performance, even if the overall pace deficit remained a concern. The French rookie improved significantly from his difficult practice session and delivered a clean lap in SQ3 to secure 10th place, just under half a second behind his teammate.

“I can be happy with the lap that I put together, it was good,” Hadjar said. “I'm not too far off Max so that's a positive but I'm not sure what happened to our pace or why we were half a second off.

"We need a little bit more of everything to be competitive tomorrow, we struggled with grip today and our power wasn't where we wanted it to be. The gap to McLaren and Ferrari was bigger than last weekend, so we need to figure out why. There's still a lot to play for over the rest of the weekend.”

The team’s struggles were evident across all three sectors, with both drivers reporting grip issues, inconsistent balance, and a lack of straight‑line performance.