Verstappen wasn't happy with his team's performance in Austin
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“Terrible. The pace, the wrong tyre, sh** pitstop, sh** engine braking. Nothing worked.”
That was Max Verstappen‘s verdict of Red Bull‘s performance after he crossed the finish line in third place at the Circuit of the Americas on Sunday.
It was a podium, his 10th of the season, and one he admitted came with a little help from the late virtual safety car, but the radio message was the more accurate summary of an afternoon in which he was aiming for his third win in a row and ended miles behind winner Kimi Antonelli.
As Verstappen himself pointed out, Red Bull‘s race wasn’t undone by a single failure. It was undone by five or six small ones, none of them dramatic, all of them arriving at a circuit where Mercedes put the margin between the top four teams at less than 0.1sec.
When four cars are that close, a team doesn’t need a disaster to lose a race. It just needs to be a little off in several places at once, as was the case for Red Bull.
The most costly error was the one Verstappen identified himself.
Verstappen kept second at the start, but Leclerc would soon pass him
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Red Bull had come to Austin carrying the lessons of Sepang and Singapore, where the softer compounds were quickest.
“Just probably sticking too much to our belief from the last two races,” he said, “where the softer compounds were the fastest, and clearly here that didn’t work.”
The warning signs were visible during the race.
By his own account, it became “quite clear that the people on the harder compounds were finding a lot of grip”, and Red Bull “didn’t really react to that”.
Ferrari‘s Charles Leclerc ran longer than Verstappen to both stops and finished on the hard, which let him close the gap in the final stint and pass first Lando Norris and then Verstappen.
Having started on the soft, Red Bull then built the rest of its strategy around that first decision.
Verstappen, on the medium, went the other way. He estimated that a different tyre choice might have been worth second place.
The slow pitstop compounded this. Verstappen described them as “seconds that you throw away”, at a point when he was fighting a close battle for second.
From aiming for victory, Verstappen finished over 17 seconds behind Antonelli
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His first stop on lap 14 was 2.7 seconds – not exactly slow – but his second on lap 31 cost him some valuable time at nearly four seconds.
In a field that tight, a stop that loses a couple of seconds can be costly, and while it probably wasn’t a decisive factor in Verstappen’s finishing position, it did give him more ammo to support his view that the race was sub-optimal from his team’s side.
Then there was the car itself.
Verstappen described “inconsistent behaviour around the corners, every lap, every corner, different behaviour” and said that you can’t build a rhythm in those circumstances.
His point was that this inconsistency costs “free lap time” before any other problem is taken into account.
To add insult to injury, Red Bull’s radio failed again, having already caused him angst in the previous race in Singapore.
It’s not a problem that always gets spotted by the public, and Verstappen said his Austin issues were not just the second time that had happened throughout the year.
Asked about it in the press conference, Verstappen wasn’t in the mood to be diplomatic.
“It’s not the second time. It’s already, I don’t know how many times this year. Maybe we should just start communicating in sign language. It’s probably cheaper as well. It’s a disaster.”
That matters here because the other problems were ones the team might have been able to manage in real time. A tyre strategy that isn’t working can be adjusted, but only if the driver and the pit wall can talk about it, and Verstappen made it clear that Red Bull didn’t react in time to what the hard-tyre runners were doing.
Team-mate Isack Hadjar’s afternoon, meanwhile, went wrong from the start and didn’t get much better.
Hadjar also had an afternoon to forget
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“Everything went wrong,” he said, starting with a clutch delivery problem at the start. “I did everything on my side,” he insisted, calling it “completely out of my control again”.
He lost places to the Ferraris, but recovered to run a good first stint, and then switched to a one-stop, which was the strategy that took Antonelli to victory.
But a power unit problem that arose in the pitlane compromised the rest of his race, finishing a distant fifth after being overtaken by Lewis Hamilton near the end.
No single item on the list of problems Verstappen named looked fatal to his chances of victory.
Kimi Antonelli all but secured the Formula 1 title with a champion’s drive at the 2026 United States Grand Prix, writes Mark Hughes. Behind him, forlorn rivals failed to make their superior pace stick
A slow stop happens. A tyre choice that doesn’t work happens. A power unit that behaves oddly is something every team deals with at some point in a season. Verstappen even said his start was “normal” and that he hadn’t lost a position.
But Red Bull went to Austin without a car that was clearly the fastest in Verstappen’s hands like in some of the previous races, and when that is the case, there is no margin to absorb errors.
Verstappen himself admitted the team hadn’t maximised the weekend, and he added that Red Bull is “normally very good at these things, but today we weren’t.”
The result, third place with a podium that owed something to the final VSC, perhaps flatters what happened.
What it shows is how fine the margins can be in 2026. Antonelli won by 13 seconds, but the race behind it was decided by small things, and Red Bull’s weekend demonstrated how quickly several of them can add up.
