Max Verstappen secured another win over Charles Leclerc thanks to higher point speed and better tire handling on Sunday, but the energy drinks team again suffered from several reliability issues over the weekend.
After completing 14 laps in FP1, the Dutchman was only able to complete one lap of Friday’s FP2 as a gearbox change caused him to miss the opening minutes and another hydraulic problem forced him to return early.
His teammate Sergio Pérez also suffered from Red Bull’s unreliability as a loss of power during the race slowed his attempts to pass Carlos Sainz in the hunt for third place on the podium.
Red Bull arrived in Miami after an almost perfect weekend at Imola, where they achieved an incontestable victory including a double. But earlier, both cars had been forced to retire in Bahrain, while Verstappen suffered another DNF in Australia.
While Verstappen leads Leclerc in wins (3-2) after five races, the Dutchman’s two retirements have meant that instead of leading the championship, he trails the Monegasque driver by a difference of 19 points.
Speaking after the Miami GP, the Red Bull driver encouraged his team to find a way to repeat Imola’s smooth weekend on a more regular basis, acknowledging that the team’s operations “are still too unpredictable”.
“For my part, I had a lot of problems on Friday, which compromises the weekend, and especially yesterday [Saturday],” said the reigning F1 world champion.
“Of course, today everything went well from the beginning, but it could also have been the other way around. And then of course you can say it’s fair, because if you missed almost everything on Friday, what can you do about it?”
“We just have to do one weekend without any problems. I think of course Imola we did, but it’s still a bit unpredictable so we just have to make sure that we are more reliable and that we are more on top of these things. “.
“But as you can see the car is fast. I’m very happy about that, I mean if it was slow and reliable it probably wouldn’t be a good thing either.”
Asked by Motorsport.com about the problems, which appear to be persistent, Red Bull principal Christian Horner denied that the RB18 is “particularly fragile”, explaining that the reliability issues were due to “pesky things” he relies on. that will be fixed.
“I don’t think the car is particularly fragile. I think there have been annoying things that would normally have come to light in pre-season testing, but they are as we go through the season.
“That’s been frustrating, but, you know, we’re working closely with HRC [Honda] and they’re giving us great support, so I think we’ll work this out.”
