Max Verstappen’s feet were “flying off the pedals” as…

Following the significant progress made in Miami, the opening day of the race weekend in Canada proved more challenging for Red Bull. Max Verstappen had to settle for seventh place in sprint qualifying, just ahead of team-mate Isack Hadjar.

During the second segment of sprint qualifying, Verstappen had already complained over the team radio and returned to the pitlane early, despite sitting in the danger zone in ninth place at the time.

A seventh-place starting position for the third sprint race of the season is not what Verstappen was looking for, although based on his feeling behind the wheel he had not expected anything different.

“I'm not surprised. I mean, my feeling in the car was not very good. I was struggling a lot with just the ride of the car,” Verstappen said after sprint qualifying.

“So, all over the bumps, I couldn't put my foot down. Actually, my feet were even flying off the pedals. It just made it very difficult to be consistent and that's something that we need to investigate.”

Attacking the kerbs is traditionally a key factor at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, and according to Verstappen that is precisely where he is currently losing a significant amount of lap time.

“That was not great. So, of course, we are stuck with that for the sprint, but yeah, some other things to understand and hopefully that will be done a bit better for qualifying.”

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing (Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images)

Parc fermé will be opened once more before the main qualifying session, meaning Red Bull can theoretically still turn its weekend around. According to technical director Pierre Waché, the team at least has some ideas about what needs to improve.

“We saw a direction to go in, but putting the tyre where we want it to be was quite difficult. Sprint qualifying didn't go as we had hoped. 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.”

Pirelli has indicated that the Montreal circuit offered very little grip on Friday and that drivers found it difficult to get the tyres up to temperature, which also explains why almost everyone completed two flying laps on the softs in SQ3.

For Red Bull, the focus is on two things: getting the tyres into a better operating window on Saturday and solving the ride issues so Verstappen and Hadjar can push closer to the limit.