"It is very complicated at the moment," admits Verstappen after a tricky day in Shanghai

Red Bull endured a diffifult Saturday at the Chinese Grand Prix, with both the Sprint and Grand Prix qualifying exposing a car that has been difficult to balance and inconsistent to drive.

Despite the struggles, the team remains focused on understanding the root causes of the performance drop, while both drivers expressed determination to turn things around in Sunday’s race.

The day began with a mixed Sprint Race. Max Verstappen managed to salvage P9 after starting P8, though the race was compromised from the very beginning.

As the Dutchman explained, “In the Sprint, we had a difficult start, which compromised our race, but we know what went wrong and had some issues with the graining and the balance of the car.”

The team made significant setup changes ahead of qualifying, but the improvements were limited. “Going into the Qualifying session, we changed a lot on the car but it didn’t make much difference unfortunately,” he admitted.

The car’s unpredictability has been a recurring theme throughout the weekend. “It is very complicated at the moment and quite difficult to drive for me to get a good reference in and build on this, so each lap is tricky,” Verstappen said, noting that the same issues from the Sprint carried into qualifying.

Despite securing P8 with a 1:33.002, he remained cautious about expectations for the race: “I hope that tomorrow we can be a little more competitive, but let’s see what happens.”

His teammate Isack Hadjar experienced an equally challenging day, finishing the Sprint in P15 after starting P10, a result influenced by mid‑race contact that disrupted his rhythm. Still, he felt the team had made progress overnight.

“The Team put in a lot of work to improve performance from yesterday, and I felt that I extracted all I could from the car,” he said. The gains were real but inconsistent: “We've managed to find a little more pace, but the consistency from lap to lap has been harder to find.”

Qualifying offered a glimmer of encouragement as he secured P9 with a 1:33.121, close to the front-running pace. Yet he remained realistic about the team’s ambitions. “Coming out of qualifying, it’s a good feeling to be close to Max but at the same time we’d like to be fighting for better positions,” he explained.

Still, the Paris-born driver sees opportunity ahead: “P9 is a decent result to be able to fight for positions… Tomorrow my aim is to bring home my first points for the Team. It’ll be a tough race, but we will do our best.”

Team leadership echoed the drivers’ concerns. The weekend has been difficult from the very first laps, with the car behaving differently than it did in Melbourne.

As the team boss Laurent Mekies summarized, “It has certainly been a tricky weekend so far and it started in a difficult way in FP1 yesterday already. From the first laps we couldn’t find the same feeling from the car that we had in Melbourne last week, so that has been a bit of a struggle.”

He emphasized the collective effort behind the scenes: “Max, Isack, and the whole Team have been working very hard to close the gap to the competition and to recover a better feeling with the car.”

While some progress has been made, it is not yet enough. “We made a little bit of progress to close the gap in terms of performance but it’s of course not enough and not something we can be happy with.”

Still, the team sees Sunday as a crucial learning opportunity. “The most important aspect is that we complete our understanding during the race tomorrow of why it has been more difficult for us this weekend compared to Melbourne,” he said.

With the promise of on‑track action and unpredictable race dynamics, Mekies added, “There will be huge learnings to take in tomorrow’s race… we will be working hard to take any opportunities that may come our way.”