Max Verstappen isn’t banking on Mexico’s monster slipstream to save his Sunday. Fifth on the grid and almost half a second off Lando Norris’ pole time, the Red Bull driver cut a blunt figure after qualifying at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, calling his RB21’s pace “weak” across both short and long runs.
Even the 800m drag race to Turn 1 — a banker for chaos and easy gains here — didn’t fire his imagination. “I have no pace, so it doesn’t matter what I do in Turn 1,” he said, noting that even if he did jump cars at the start, “they will get me in the race.” In other words: avoid trouble, follow, hope. Not Verstappen’s usual script.
The numbers tell part of the story. Verstappen’s 1:16.070 left him chasing both McLarens on raw pace this weekend, and while his recent run has been ruthless — hoovering up 101 of the last 108 points available — Saturday looked like a hard reset. He starts behind Norris, the key rival in the title fight, while the other McLaren of Oscar Piastri lines up further back but remains a bigger points headache overall.
“Every lap I did, even in the long run, has been weak compared to the cars ahead,” Verstappen admitted. “I’m more worried about our pure pace. It’s just not been good this weekend.”
Pressed on whether Mexico’s famous Turn 1 could still unlock something, Verstappen gave a dry reply: he knows what to do; that’s not the problem. The problem is the car. “There is no real recovery drive when you have no pace,” he said later. “I need people to retire in front of me to go ahead.”
That candor tracks with what Red Bull’s power brokers have been saying since Friday: they can’t find the window. The high-altitude puzzle — where cooling margins shrink, downforce behaves differently, and drag values go weird — has caught plenty of teams out here before. This time, it’s Red Bull’s turn.
“We didn’t quite manage to put the car in a sweet spot,” said team boss Laurent Mekies. “We tried many, many things but we couldn’t quite find a way to give him a car he could push with. With the level of competition now, as soon as you fall out of your window, you pay the price straight away.”
Red Bull, Mekies added, focused a chunk of overnight work on race pace, which may have further exposed them on the single-lap stuff. But Mexico is a heat test as much as a pace test — watch the brake ducts and radiators — and there’s scope for the race to pivot on management and mistakes.
“Lando looks really, really fast. Ferrari as well,” Mekies said. “It’s still a very long race. It’s hot, everybody’s on the limit with car cooling and brake cooling, so a lot can still happen.”
It’s a fair point. This track has a habit of springing late drama, and tire life can flip strategies inside out. But Verstappen didn’t sound in the mood for maybes. He said the RB21 has felt off “every lap” this weekend, whether on fuel or light, and suggested each fresh setup swing has given with one hand and taken with the other. “If we would know, we would change it,” he said. “It’s not the lack of trying.”
None of this kills his Sunday, but it does change the tone. Starting fifth with a top speed tow in play is usually a Verstappen playground; today, it sounds like damage limitation. The upside, if you’re looking for one, is that his chief rival is directly ahead — and that can sharpen instincts at lights out. The downside is that, on form, the McLaren has looked like the quicker race car in Mexico, and Ferrari have pace in hand too.
Verstappen’s been making the maths look easy over the last month; this weekend, he might need to make the racing look ugly. Stay clean into Turn 1, pick off what’s available, manage the temperatures, and hope Mexico’s chaos tax gets levied on someone else for a change.
We’ve seen him turn grim Saturdays into grinning Sundays before. Just not often with this little confidence in the toolkit.
