Verstappen flags Red Bull start and radio failures after Austin

Max Verstappen left the United States Grand Prix frustrated despite claiming his tenth podium of the 2026 season and sixth in a row. At the Circuit of the Americas, he said a string of small setbacks stopped Red Bull from reaching the level it had targeted.

Verstappen had shown strong pace earlier in the weekend, but lost grip in Q3 after an impressive Q2 lap. He believed the car could challenge for victory in the race, yet tyre choices, inconsistent power-unit behaviour and a slow pit stop all worked against him.

Tyre calls and power-unit behaviour undermined the race

Red Bull’s recent strength with softer tyres did not carry over to Austin. Verstappen said the softer compounds were not performing as expected, while the team also got the stint order wrong. He felt Red Bull was too slow to respond when drivers on harder tyres began finding more grip.

That marked a reversal from the previous two race weekends, when the softer compounds had been the quicker option. The Austin strategy questions add another chapter to the debate covered in our report on whether Red Bull’s strategy cost Verstappen in Austria.

The tyre problem was only part of the picture. Verstappen reported inconsistent power-unit behaviour through corners, saying it changed from lap to lap and made it difficult to build rhythm. A slow stop compounded the damage. Taken together, he said, too many things went wrong for the team to extract the car’s full potential.

Starts and radio failures remain recurring concerns

Verstappen identified two problems that have troubled Red Bull throughout the year: poor starts and unreliable radio communication. He did not lose a position off the line in Austin, but described the getaway as typical of the team’s underwhelming starts this season.

Radio trouble struck both Verstappen and Isack Hadjar at the bumpy Austin circuit. Verstappen could not hear Tom Hart, who was standing in as his race engineer. The problem followed earlier communication difficulties, including an incident in Singapore involving Verstappen and regular engineer Gianpiero Lambiase.

Verstappen joked that the team might have to resort to sign language, but made clear the repeated failures were deeply frustrating. Red Bull had said after Singapore that it was seeking a strong solution; the Austin problems showed that a fix had yet to arrive.

The team also acknowledged that Kimi Antonelli had the edge on outright pace. For Verstappen, however, the sharper disappointment was that Red Bull failed to reach even the performance level it expected. That contrasts with the team’s earlier high point, its maiden 2026 victory in Bahrain.