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Red Bull Racing endured a qualifying session to forget at the Hungarian Grand Prix, with Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar unable to extract consistent performance from their RB22s. The pair will start sixth and eighth respectively, a result that leaves the team well away from the podium fight.
The weekend had been expected to offer Red Bull a stronger opportunity, but the car proved difficult to understand and even harder to trust. That uncertainty had already been evident before qualifying, with Verstappen admitting Red Bull’s Hungarian GP pace was “impossible to know”.
Verstappen’s qualifying ended with a late spin at the final corner, triggering a yellow flag for Kimi Antonelli. Hadjar had also endured a moment earlier in the session, spinning at Turn 12 in Q2 before recovering sufficiently to reach the top ten.
Hadjar was direct in his assessment of Red Bull’s performance, saying the team had been unable to find the balance it wanted throughout the weekend.
“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.”
The result was particularly frustrating because Hadjar had expected the Hungaroring to be a circuit where Red Bull could be competitive. Instead, he described it as probably one of the team’s worst venues, while acknowledging that major changes are difficult to introduce halfway through the season.
“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 comments painted the same picture. He said the car began to oversteer heavily and became progressively worse through qualifying, leaving him unable to identify a workable solution.
“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.”
Verstappen identified degradation as the central problem, carefully distinguishing it from tyre performance.
“It has been tough, but in qualifying especially the car is degrading,” he said. “We don’t have tyre deg — we have car degradation.”
He added that Red Bull was repeatedly encountering different problems from one session to the next. That lack of consistency, rather than a single isolated weakness, was the clearest concern ahead of Sunday’s race.
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.