Christian Horner dismissed the suggestion that a recent FIA rule change has hampered Red Bull's pace.
It was a surprising result even after Horner had warned that he expected Red Bull to find things tougher this weekend. After all, the team has won every race so far this year and Verstappen is on a 10-race winning streak. It raised suspicions that the FIA's technical directive 18 might have changed things. The intervention from the governing body was to outlaw aerodynamic components deemed to be too flexible on safety grounds.
"Nothing has changed on the car. We tried a new aero part on Friday, and we reverted on that component, so it's a tried and tested set-up that we have. But it just hasn't responded on this circuit, on this asphalt. "It's very, very confusing to have dropped the amount of pace that we have. The car is just not responding to changes, you can hear this understeer, oversteer, braking issues – it's like we haven't managed to get the tyre into the right working window.