Max Verstappen’s Monaco Grand Prix lasted barely long enough for the field to reach Sainte Devote, and even that was a minor miracle.
The Red Bull driver revealed his RB22 effectively died the moment he tried to launch from second on the grid, losing power as he dropped the clutch. For a split second, the bigger story wasn’t his race being over before it began — it was whether the start was about to turn into a properly nasty pile-up.
“Yeah, formation lap I’ve already felt a bit off, but then on the pre-start it was completely… normally you find your RPM target, but it was not going at all,” Verstappen explained afterwards. “It’s just shooting up and down a lot, bit weird.
“And then as soon as I dropped the clutch, that was it. The engine bogged down completely, and after that, the noise that I heard from the engine, once I got some power back out of Turn One, was very bad. So I immediately just lifted it off and brought it home.”
Over the radio, the frustration was as blunt as it was understandable. Verstappen complained the car was “completely f***ed”, adding that the problem was already there on the formation lap and that “the engine was broken”.
In Monaco, even a mediocre start can be punished. A car stopping dead on the grid is the sort of moment that can rewrite a race — and not in the fun way. Verstappen said he had so little drive that he was essentially relying on wheel friction to drag the car out of the way, angling left as the pack funnelled towards Turn 1.
“Yeah, I mean, I had no power, right?” he admitted when asked whether he’d been worried about what was coming behind. “So I was steering left with the friction of the wheels at that speed. I was just praying that everyone would go right, but everyone luckily reacted very well.”
The RB22 eventually crawled away, but the reprieve didn’t last. Verstappen made it back to the pitlane and into the Red Bull garage before the end of lap one, his race done without ever really starting. The mechanics pushed the car back as the team’s weekend — which had looked set up for a podium — fell into the same familiar category as so many Monaco heartbreaks: a result erased by a failure you can’t drive around.
What will sting for Red Bull is the nature of it. This wasn’t a marginal strategy call, a slow stop, or a brush with a barrier. It was an outright loss of power at the one moment a modern F1 car is most exposed: stationary on the grid, surrounded by rivals with nowhere to go. If there’s one kind of DNF that sends teams straight into forensic mode, it’s a start-line power unit glitch.
Verstappen was careful not to dress it up as some wider crisis, but he did underline the obvious priority.
“There’s not a turning around,” he said. “It’s just we need to make sure that, of course, we finish the races. But we need to understand what went wrong today.
“If I would be leading the championship, that, of course, it is a very, very painful one. This is less painful, but it’s still really annoying and disappointing, we know, because everyone wants to finish.
“I just hope that we understand quickly what it is and that we can fix it.”
That line about championship context lands with a certain edge. Monaco is the kind of circuit where you take your points when you can, because the track can take them away for reasons that have nothing to do with pace. Red Bull had put Verstappen in position to capitalise, and instead they leave with a DNF that came with a side order of danger — the sort the paddock doesn’t tend to shrug off, even if everyone escaped it this time.
For Verstappen personally, it’s another reminder that even on a weekend where the ingredients are there, you’re still only as safe as the machinery beneath you. In the tightest, most unforgiving race of the year, his Monaco was over in the time it took to drop a clutch.
