Max Verstappen only finished P2 at the Miami GP as Lando Norris took his maiden F1 win. Both the Dutchman and Christian Horner said that a damaged floor didn’t help Red Bull’s fight against McLaren.
As the safety car was deployed, Verstappen found himself behind Norris, who never gave up the lead of the race from that moment on. The British driver put almost 8 seconds between himself and the Red Bull driver, who seemed to struggle with pace.
Even though Verstappen didn’t feel he had damage to his car and thought that the lack of pace was only due to setup issues and tire management, the Dutchman later changed his mind when he saw the car after the race.
“I never really felt comfortable the whole weekend with it,” he said. “I think on the medium it was still OK-ish, but on the hard, it was quite a disaster.
“I mean, just low grip, just very tricky balance in the low-speed. I couldn’t really lean on the rear while in the high-speed I was understeering a lot. So when you have these two issues, you cannot also balance it out because you’re chasing two different things. So yeah, just driving to the grip that I had and it was not a lot.
“It didn’t feel different [he said when asked if after hitting the cone his pace became worse], so I don’t know. Maybe it was already damaged. I don’t know. I mean I hit that thing and then my pace was the same so I didn’t really know if there was damage.
“When we took the car back to the garage, we also found that the floor was damaged and had a hole in which could have been picked up from hitting the cone.”
Horner also stated that there was pretty significant damage to the rear part of the floor. Therefore, that compromised Verstappen’s race as well as lack of balance due to a not-so-perfect setup.
“I don’t think we had a great balance all weekend. Obviously, he hit the bollard around lap 20 and that has actually done quite a lot of damage to the underside of the car, so we will have to look at exactly what the effect of that was.
“It is a reasonable amount of the area around the left rear floor. There is a reasonable amount that’s missing and you can see it awfully flexing as well, so it certainly wouldn’t be helping.
“He lost two-and-a-half-tenths in Turn 1 every lap,” he said. “Whether that was because of the damage when you actually see the pictures of what was missing, it wasn’t designed like that.”