Verstappen's final day thwarted by gearbox shortage

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Max Verstappen has revealed that a shortage of available replacement gearbox components was the reason he was only able to run 29 laps on the final day of pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

Red Bull had attempted to rebuild the badly damaged RB15 overnight following a heavy accident for Verstappen's team mate Pierre Gasly on Thursday, which had damaged the gearbox in use at the time.

"It's all related to what happened yesterday," Verstappen admitted. "It's just a shame."

Even though the team flew in new components in overnight from Milton Keynes, they still weren't able to get the car back into full working order on Friday. Verstappen completed only a minimal number of laps in the morning and was then to forced to sit out the afternoon entirely.

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“We were a bit short on gearboxes. Two were already broken in two crashes, so that was it," he told reporters after the event. “If you already have two which are destroyed, it’s not going to be ideal.

“The team worked so very hard to even let me drive today at all,” he continued. “We just had very few parts. Everything came over from England last night, so it's a miracle we were even able to go out."

Despite the setback, Verstappen was happy with the way that the test had gone for Red Bull and with the reliability and performance shown by their new Honda engines.

“I think we have a pretty good package, and also the engine seems to work really well," he said. "It can always be better in winter testing, but in general we had a very strong test.

"We did a lot of laps," he pointed out of the eight days as a whole. "Even though today was maybe not the best day but in general, I think I've always been doing over 100 laps.

“It wasn't great today, but the speed looks alright. Looking at long runs the top teams are all fairly close. We can be happy with that.”

Verstappen is certainly hoping that this year's car will fare better than its predecessor. A number of issues early in the season, including a lack of pace and poor reliability with the previous Renault units, wrote off Verstappen's championship almost before it had started.

“Last year the world championship was out of reach after the summer break," he acknowledged. "[This year] in Melbourne we need to score good points, no matter the positions.

“We're fairly good on pace. Not sure whether it's enough, because we didn't really get to do low fuel runs [in the final two days of testing].

"But if we look to the longer runs, it looks all pretty promising. So yeah, I’m looking forward to start racing now."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.