Max Verstappen admits he can't explain why Red Bull is so far off the pace after only qualifying seventh for the Hungarian Grand Prix.

On the circuit where he claimed his first Formula 1 pole 12 months ago, the Dutchman was three-tenths slower than that lap this year and a massive 1.4s off the new record set by Lewis Hamilton.

“I don’t know why the car behaves like this,” he told Sky Sports.

“Clearly, something is not working well compared to last year, when we had a very good balance on this track.

“The whole week was very tricky and it is very difficult to understand. We have tried a lot but it doesn’t really seem to work, it really is a disappointing qualification.”

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So poor was the Red Bull that both Racing Point's and both Ferrari's will start ahead of him on the grid and Verstappen knows a podium is going to be a very tough ask.

“The speed of all teams is close together so we have to wait and see how things will go,” he added.

“Of course, we won’t start on the better tyre for the race, but it is what it is. I’m going to do my best tomorrow and we’ll see where we end up. It’s definitely going to be hard to catch up on this circuit.”

Heading into this weekend, the performance of the RB16 in low-speed corners in Austria had many believing Red Bull would be keeping Mercedes more than honest.

And both Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas were surprised by their advantage.

“I definitely wasn’t expecting them to be as far off as they have been this weekend. You saw the pace of them last year," the world champion commented.

“This is not a power circuit, this is more about the car and the mechanical grip and aero package. I thought that they had a better package than, I guess, today’s results showed.

“I don’t know if they all had great laps or not, but still either way that’s a big, big gap.”

Bottas added: “It’s very surprising, for sure I was expecting them to be maybe potentially closer here than Austria.

“Obviously I don’t know the details of how their session actually went – was it nice and clean or was there other issues? But the whole weekend, too, they’ve not really been that close. So it’s just surprising, obviously I don’t know the details yet.”