Horner discloses Verstappen’s injuries following a startling error
Max Verstappen’s damage when he collided with a bollard during the Miami Grand Prix was made public by Christian Horner.
Max Verstappen’s collision with a bollard resulted in considerable floor damage, as revealed by Red Bull team chief Christian Horner. Despite this, the team boss lauded Verstappen’s second-place performance as “pretty decent”.When Verstappen made an uncommon mistake at the narrow Turn 15 on Lap 20, he was leading the race by nearly a few seconds and severely damaged the underbelly of his RB20.
Every lap that followed at the Miami International Autodrome cost the current world champion a significant amount of time due to the damage, which benefited Lando Norris.
Although Norris was already outpacing Verstappen in P5, he took up the actual race lead on Lap 29 after taking advantage of a cheap pit stop during the race’s lone safety car.
Verstappen was demoted to second position by McLaren’s misfortune, and although he attacked Norris after the restart, he soon lagged behind the British driver who won his first Formula One race.
Like almost everyone else in the race, Verstappen pitted ahead of the safety car, but up until then he was still holding an edge over the drivers in behind, including Norris.
The actual fatality was caused by Norris’s newer tires after the safety car, along with the damage to the Red Bull driver.
Horner disclosed to a limited group of media, including RacingNews365, “He hit the bollard around Lap 20 and that’s actually done quite a lot of damage to the underside of the car.” Therefore, we’ll need to examine the precise consequences of it.
“But at that point, he had enough speed to be passing Lando and Oscar [Piastri] in the rear before he sustained that damage, and it goes without saying that we then pitted.”
“And indeed, Lando had an almost free stop when the safety car appeared at the ideal moment. However, that’s obviously bad for us since that means your tires are six or seven laps older.
“And with the damage, I think that actually second place was actually still a pretty decent result.”
Red Bull, a Milton Keynes-based company, determined from its preliminary statistics that Verstappen’s floor damage was losing him a significant 0.250s each lap.
As the McLaren star managed to get away nearly eight seconds later, Norris maximized the suffering that Verstappen’s injury was bringing the three-time world champion.
“He lost two and a half tenths on every lap in turn one,” Horner said.
“Now, whether that was because of the damage, I think when you actually see the pictures of what was missing, it wasn’t designed like that.”
