'You win or lose as a team' insists Verstappen after Baku blow

Sunday proved to be a disastrous outing for Red Bull, with Max Verstappen looking distinctly off-form throughout the weekend before coming undone during Sunday's race.

Despite coming top on first practice on Friday, Verstappen had never looked comfortable with his car this weekend and struggled to sixth place on the grid in qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

While he made up a place at the start with a neat pass on Mercedes' George Russell, he made little further progress during the afternoon. Bottled up behind Lando Norris, he ended being caught and re-passed by Russell on lap 34.

Verstappen complained that his car “was jumping around a lot in all the low-speed corners”, adding that “my wheels were literally coming off the ground."

"You lose contact patch with the tarmac which you don’t want, that then caused me to slide a lot more, overheat the tyres more and there was no way to drive around it so the pace was just a bit all over the place.

• Read also: Stunning win for Piastri after late crash in Baku

“I had to box and then it was just a bit unfortunate I got stuck behind Alex and Lando" who had started on hard tyres and were running a much longer first stint, he explained. "I was in that fight, George passed me.

After that "we actually had good pace, the two of us. We were catching the leaders," he reported.

"But as soon as I got close to George again within that window where you have the dirty air, because of the jumping that I’m dealing with I’m sliding already quite a bit.

"When I got close to him I’m sliding even more, and that just tipped it over the edge where it becomes quite uncontrollable towards the end of the race, which was very difficult again.”

Surprisingly, Verstappen's team mate Sergio Perez was looking much stronger this weekend with a number of upgrades to the RB20 fast-tracked to the race team this weekend.

Perez was vying over second place with Ferrari pair Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz when Verstappen found himself easily picked off by Norris whcih dropped him to seventh place.

"I think the changes we did to the car were positive, but then you still need to do the set-up on the car," Verstappen said, denying that the upgrades had favoured the Mexican's driving style.

“I think we were heading in the right direction but then the changes that we made before qualifying tipped it over the edge," he suggested. "We paid the price for that in the race."

Perez crashed on the penultimate lap after contact with Sainz, promoting Verstappen to fifth but doing serious damage to the team's overall prospects in the constructors championship where they are now 20 points behind McLaren.

“Today ended up being a worse case scenario, but the most important thing is that Checo is okay," Verstappen said.

"For the Championship, we are going to work together as a Team and the fight is not over," he added "You win or lose as a Team and we won’t give up. It is as simple as that."

"It has cost us crucial points for Checo and the Constructors’ Championship, so we are very disappointed," added Red Bull boss Christian Horner. "Max wasn’t happy with the set up of the car so we’ll have to look into what the difference was there.

"For the Constructors, it was obviously a big swing in the last three laps and we have lost out on some significant points in the Championship. However we will brush ourselves down and fight back hard."

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