Max Verstappen says Red Bull are “quite competitive” despite the poor result in Practice 2 at the Spanish Grand Prix.
After splitting the two Mercedes’ in the morning, the Dutchman was only ninth in the afternoon session in Barcelona after failing to manage a representative lap on the soft tyre.
Even so, with Red Bull looking to respond after being beaten by Mercedes in Portugal last weekend, Verstappen was still relatively satisfied by his first impressions.
“We seem quite competitive,” he said via Crash.net. “How competitive we’re going to be tomorrow is always going to be a question mark but from our side, we were quite happy.
“Of course you always want to improve and you want to do better but there was nothing weird going on today. So yeah, just have to make sure tomorrow, we’re out there.”
Verstappen’s first lower fuel lap in FP2 was ruined by an error at the redesigned Turn 10, which is tempting drivers to carry speed in before doing a ‘wall of death’ around the outside on the exit.
“[I was] just a little bit wide in Turn 10 and got onto the kerb,” he explained.
“Overall, I think we had quite a good day. The car seems quite competitive, so looking forward to tomorrow to try and improve a bit further, but nothing too shocking today.”
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The problem for Red Bull was teammate Sergio Perez wasn’t able to continue pressuring Mercedes as the Mexican was only 10th quickest.
“It was a tricky day,” Perez admitted. “These days with the limited practice we have, we had a couple of delays in both sessions, and that means we were rushing a bit into traffic and stuff like that.
“A lot of understanding and pace to be found tonight, especially over one lap as I think the long-run pace looks stronger. We have to work and see what we are able to take for qualifying, given how important it is here.
“Hopefully we are able to recover the pace tonight and we can be in the mix tomorrow.”