Hadjar and Verstappen: "Every lap was worse and worse" as Red Bull struggles through Hungaroring qualifying

Credit: Formula One

It was a qualifying session to forget for Red Bull Racing at the Hungarian Grand Prix, with Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar unable to find any answers as their RB22s fought them all the way to a sixth and eighth-place lockout on the grid.

Verstappen's session ended with a late spin at the final corner that also brought out a yellow flag for Kimi Antonelli, while Hadjar had already survived a spin of his own at Turn 12 in Q2 before recovering to scrape into the top ten. Neither driver left the paddock with much to smile about.

Hadjar was blunt about how difficult the car had been to drive all weekend, describing a balance the team simply couldn't get on top of. "It's been very annoying the whole weekend," Hadjar said. "We can't seem to find the balance we want, and it's very hard to drive."

Asked whether it had simply been a case of throwing different setup options at the car without success, and whether the Hungaroring's bumps and the stiff setup they demand were working against Red Bull specifically, Hadjar admitted the team had expected far better going into the weekend.

"No, it's just — I thought it was going to be maybe a track where we would be competitive, but it's probably one of our worst," he said. "Halfway through the season, it's hard to make big steps at the moment."

Verstappen's account of his own session was similarly grim. The Red Bull driver described a car that got progressively harder to drive as qualifying wore on, with a sudden onset of oversteer that never let up.

"I really can't make anything out of it. It's just really, really tough," Verstappen said. "The car suddenly just started oversteering a lot, and honestly every lap that I did in qualifying just was worse and worse. So yeah, it's not good."

Asked how hard it had been to salvage any performance from the car through qualifying, Verstappen pointed to degradation as the core issue, framing it as a wider car problem rather than simply a tyre one. "It has been tough, but in qualifying especially the car is degrading," he said. "We don't have tyre deg — we have car degradation."

Pushed on whether the scale of the struggle had been surprising, and whether the Hungaroring itself was exposing something specific about the car, Verstappen pointed instead to a lack of consistency in what was going wrong session to session.

"We keep having different problems all the time, and that's probably the biggest issue at the moment," he said. "There is always something else that arises, and yeah, that's not good."

With Verstappen starting sixth and Hadjar eighth, Red Bull will head into Sunday's race well off the podium fight, with both drivers pointing to the same underlying issue: a car that has been difficult to trust in exactly the moments it needed to deliver.