Max Verstappen Believes he Could have got Pole if Not for Turbo Issue

Red Bull driver Max Verstappen has been on the hunt for his first F1 pole position ever. He came ever so close at the British Grand Prix this weekend, but was foiled by a “huge bummer” of turbo lag.

As a result, Verstappen starts the race in fourth place, behind the Mercedes duo and Charles LeClerc. The Dutchman was a tenth of a second slower than pole man Valtteri Bottas. However, he claimed that he lost at least two tenths of a second on his best lap.

Max Verstappen reported a “problem with turbo lag” particularly in low-speed corners. He felt that his Red Bull was not giving him the desired power, particularly at low revs. According to him, he could have “fought for pole” without the issue, since he was quite close in qualifying compared to Friday practice.

“If you look at the whole weekend then I just didn’t have a good balance in the car up to qualifying,” said Verstappen. “How we managed to turn that around in qualifying was good.

“But the whole day I was suffering from turbo lag, which means it holds back when you step on the throttle, before it picks up.

“That cost us one and a half to two tenths today for sure, so looking at my time that’s a huge bummer.”

As of now, Red Bull and Honda are taking a look at what went wrong and what caused the disconnection between Verstappen’s throttle application and the resulting power output.

Thought-provokingly, this is not the first time such a situation has befallen Max Verstappen.

He said “I have had it before. It’s just fine-tuning, but we couldn’t fine-tune it today.”

“Normally we can, today we couldn’t. So all the time you go on power, and some corners are low-RPM, there is a lag.

“You go on throttle and nothing is happening and the suddenly it’s kicking in. So you lose performance, especially here.

“Most of the exits after [the slower corners] it’s a very long straight. You just continuously lose time.”

He concluded: “Well it’s a completely different power unit isn’t it, so a lot of benefits and some things are of course different.

“It’s just a bit more fine-tuning. Normally we always get it right. You change some things around and it’s fine.”