Verstappen worried by 'severely off the pace' Red Bull

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Max Verstappen was clearly struggling for pace in Friday's two practice sessions at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, with Red Bull not able to keep up with Ferrari, McLaren or Mercedes in Imola.

It's a dramatic change in fortunes for the team that had dominated the last few seasons and comes after they also lacked their usual edge in Miami two weeks ago, in a race won by Lando Norris.

Verstappen has been known to struggle in the first day of a Grand Prix only to sweep back to the top over the remainder of the weekend. But the world champion looked genuinely concerned about the situation this time.

He ended first practice in fifth and ten slipped to seventh in the second. he was over half a second behind Ferrari's Charles Leclerc who was quickest in both.

Verstappen's team mate Sergio Perez fared no batter and ended the day in eighth a further tenth behind the Dutch driver suggesting that the problem was related to the car's overall performance rather than being driver specific issues.

Read also: Leclerc stays top in FP2 as Red Bull remain off the pace in Imola

"A difficult day," Verstappen told F1TV. :Just difficult to get a good balance and just not really feeling comfortable in the car, moving around a lot.

"It's very easy to lose the car, so we have a few things that we have to look at because today definitely," he continued. "Just bad, just not comfortable."

Nor was it just single lap speed that was eluding Verstappen today. "The long run was also really bad, so definitely a few things that we have to improve if we want to be competitive tomorrow.

"We were just severely off the pace that we need to fix," he added, not sounding confident of faring any better in qualifying. "I guess it can't be worse than what we had today, right?

"We'll look at a few things that we can do better for tomorrow. But yeah, it looks a bit like the others took a bit of a step forward, and from our side just a bad day."

Verstappen has been provided with new upgrades of his own this weekend including an all-new front wing, a revised floor and rear bodywork tweaks. But they don't seem to be working for him.

Verstappen's temper wasn't helped by being impeded during the session by an idling Lewis Hamilton through the Villeneuve chicane before Tosa.

"It's not the first time," Verstappen grumbled. "You try to, of course, always stay calm about it, but yeah it happened again. [But] I don't want to really talk about it too much, because that's not our issue today."

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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.