Over the years we've become accustomed to Max Verstappen and Red Bull sandbagging in practice only to come alive and blow apart their rivals in qualifying. But in Monza, that didn't happen - and it's left the team reeling.
Verstappen and his team mate Sergio Perez had looked to be struggling for pace and balance on Friday, but optimistic of finding a solution overnight with the help of their support team and simulator work back at Milton Keynes.
But there was no improvement in final practice, and both drivers continued to struggle when it came to Italian GP qualifying in the afternoon, with both drivers making costly mistakes as they pushed to the limits.
When it came to the final round the pair finished in seventh and eighth - only good enough for the fourth row on the grid. But more significant was just how far behind they were in terms of speed.
Both Verstappen and Perez were half a second off the pace of the McLaren, Mercedes and Ferraris cars starting ahead of them tomorrow, a shocking turnaround from a team so dominant last year and the start of this season.
“I had no ****ing grip at all on this set [of tyres]," Verstappen said over the team radio to his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase after his first push lap in Q3. "Shocking.”
After returning to the paddock at the end of the session, Verstappen told the media in parc ferme that “For whatever reason in Q3 I picked up a lot of understeer on both tyre sets.
“This is something that I don’t understand at the moment. I mean, it was just not drivable anymore. I couldn’t attack any corner," he said. "That’s something that is very weird.
"Going four-tenths slower than we did in Q2 is just not normal," he exclaimed. "It was just not working for whatever reason. I think the temperature dropped a little bit.”
“I already had the same problem on the lap before, you know, on the other tyre set," he noted. "But still, the balance difference that I had in Q3 was very weird. I never experienced something like that before.”
Verstappen admitted that the gap in pace today meant he had little chance of challenging for victory or even a podium tomorrow. “You cannot win when you’re too slow,” he said.
“The long runs might look good on paper but it didn’t really feel like that personally," he said. “The problem is that when you don’t have a balanced car, in the race that is quite painful on tyres.
"Maybe with how the car is at the moment it might be a little bit better for the race, but we’re also starting in the back of let’s say the top group. So we'll just have to wait and see what happens in front of us. We’ll find out tomorrow.”
The drop in form for Red Bull was already a cause for concern last week in Zandvoort. Verstappen hasn't won a race since Spain or been on pole since Austria and it's allowing McLaren to eat into their lead in the championship.
Fixing the problems with the RB20 is now a matter of urgency for team principal Christian Horner. "There’s something amiss that the others can all improve on new tyres but we were miles away," he told Sky Sports F1.
"We need to understand that and understand it quickly," Horner said. We need to obviously understand it and understand why on the older tyre we were able to do that time but with two sets of new tyres we couldn’t get anywhere near it.”
“Q2 didn’t look too bad, but there was still the handling characteristics that Max has been talking about," he continued. “The balance just isn’t there for him. You can hear from his comments that it’s something fundamental that's happening that we’re not on top of at the moment.
“We’re looking at everything. We ran the older spec last weekend to see if that redressed any of the issues at all and the reality was we still had the same handling characteristics and issues with that as the beginning of the year."
Horner said that its work at recent practice sessions had given them a lot of data to analyse, but that it was "a lot to get our head around". In the meantime their rivals - McLaren especially - are gaining fast.
“We can see the McLarens have made a significant step over the last few races. We're now behind Ferrari and Mercedes here as well, so there’s a lot to do," he admitted.
Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter
