The world champion had just stolen the lead from Carlos Sainz at Silverstone, when he suddenly started to slow down due to what he thought was a puncture.
However, after pitting to change his tyres, he quickly realized that the feeling was not improving. Max Verstappen continued to suffer a mysterious loss of downforce that the team suspected was caused by some car damage and eventually crossed the checkered flag in seventh.
Television footage showed the Dutchman running over a piece of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari early in the race, and it was thought his problem might be related to that.
It was after the race that Red Bull discovered that the problem had been caused by a piece from one of the AlphaTauris, which had lodged under the Dutchman’s RB18.
Yuki Tsunoda and Pierre Gasly had a minor incident on lap 11, dashing both hopes of scoring points at Silverstone, and left the piece in the middle of the track.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner , who showed those present a photo of Verstappen holding the piece, made some calculations and said that the defending world champion’s car had lost 20% of its downforce.
“We didn’t have a puncture,” said Horner, explaining Verstappen’s problem.
“He said [the car] felt really bad, like a puncture. But basically on lap 11 he ran over a piece of an AlphaTauri after an incident they had between them.”
“So he’s done the whole race with a piece of an AlphaTauri endplate stuck to the bottom of his car. It just sat there and got stuck.”
Verstappen explained that he didn’t know during the race what the problem was, but he realized very quickly how affected his car was when he inspected it in parc ferme.
“When I got out of the car I looked under the car and on the left side, it’s completely broken, everything is gone,” he said.
“Once I got to the front of the race, when Carlos Sainz made a mistake, a few corners later, in 5, there was a piece of carbon fiber.
“But when I saw it I couldn’t move left or right, so I tried to hit it head-on. But instead it went under me and smashed everything.”
“It looked like a puncture because suddenly I had no balance and the car jumped a lot. So we decided to pit and even after that the car was difficult to drive.
Although Verstappen and Red Bull did their best to try to balance the car as well as possible for the rest of the race, he admitted that taking care of the tires was a constant struggle.
“The hard part was finding a good aerodynamic balance due to of course the huge downforce mainly located at the rear to try to help the front wing.
“When you do that, you have overload, so it wasn’t ideal for the hard tyres. Then with the last set of tyres, we improved a little bit, but it was very hard.”
“After all, I think seventh place is a good result,” concluded the Dutchman.
