'My feet were flying off the pedals' - Max Verstappen reveals Canadian GP frustration
Max Verstappen will start the Canadian Grand Prix sprint race from the fourth row
A frustrated Max Verstappen said his feet were “flying off the pedals” after ride issues saw him struggling in Formula 1 sprint qualifying in Canada.
The Red Bull driver was a solid P3 in SQ1, but dropped to P9 in a difficult SQ2, before gaining a couple of spots in the final session to claim P7 on the sprint grid.
Although the Montreal layout was resurfaced as recently as 2024, the four-time champion said the circuit's bumps were making his life difficult.
“I'm not surprised,” he said when asked about the outcome of qualifying. “Just my feeling in the car was not very good. I was struggling a lot with just the ride of the car, so all over the bumps, I couldn't put my foot down.
“Actually, my feet were even flying off the pedals, so yeah, it just made it very difficult to be consistent. And that's something that we need to investigate.”
Verstappen accepted that he won’t be able to improve matters until he’s able to make setup changes for main qualifying: “It was not great. So, of course, we're stuck with that for the sprint. But some other things to understand, and hopefully that will be then a bit better for quali.”
Verstappen’s team-mate, Isack Hadjar, qualified one place and just 0.101s behind, despite also being unhappy with the ride quality of the car.
“I had a slow buildup,” he said. “In FP1, I didn't even get a time on the soft, so I had poor references. I was building up slowly, and I had finally a good feeling in Q3 on the soft.
“I'm happy about that final lap, and also the gap to my team mate is closer, obviously, than Miami, so it's a bit reassuring. But at the moment, we both don't have a good feeling in the car.”
He added: “We are struggling massively with bouncing, and the track state is not good, and this is where we're losing a lot of time. Even if the grip is there, we can't use it.”
RBR technical director Pierre Wache echoed that view: “We had an issue with Max where car performance deteriorated as the session went on, so we need to understand that. I think we had more performance available to us, but we just weren't able to extract it today.”
In this article
Adam Cooper attended his first F1 race at Brands Hatch as a 10-year-old fan in 1976. He became a freelance journalist for Autosport magazine in 1985 while still at university, initially covering everything from club racing to the FIA World Sportscar Championship.
