In the 2021 Turkish Grand Prix, where he will start second alongside Valtteri Bottas, Max Verstappen does not believe Red Bull has the pace to beat Mercedes.
Lewis Hamilton, Verstappen’s title rival, topped qualifying in Istanbul but will start the race from 11th due to a grid penalty he will get for using his fourth engine of the season before Friday practice in Turkey.
Verstappen was asked if he believes his team has enough performance to win the race on Sunday after qualifying third, 0.328 seconds slower than Hamilton and 0.198 seconds slower than Bottas: “No, but we’ll of course just try to follow and see what we can do. And see what happens in the race in general.”
Verstappen has had a difficult first two days of track action in Istanbul, with understeer and then random snaps of oversteer during FP2, spinning in the wet-to-dry FP3 session, and again going around at the start of Q1.
After Friday’s practice, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said his crew had “a full night [ahead] burning the midnight oil with the engineers and back in Milton Keynes as well” to try to fix Verstappen’s “balance mish-mash.”
Red Bull had “made some decent improvements” as a result of that work, according to Verstappen, “compared to yesterday, where we were battling a bit more to grasp how to be quick around here.”
“[The team] was just trying to work on that,” he continued, “and I think in qualifying it was a little bit better, but still not perfect.”
“I was still quite happy with the result at the end and the lap itself. Can’t really be too disappointed about that.”
As a result of Hamilton’s penalty, Verstappen will move up the grid, while his title rival will start outside the top 10 – although on the same medium tyres as Verstappen and Bottas.
Verstappen, on the other hand, is pessimistic about starting from the left side of the grid, away from the racing line, beside Bottas – the same spot where he had a bad start in the rainy race last year.
“I don’t think that’s a great place to start – on the inside,” said the Dutchman. “Because there is no grip on the inside line. We’ll see how that goes.”
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