F1: My tires were slower than I expected

Max Verstappen was only one of two drivers to start the Sao Paulo GP Sprint Race to start on the medium tires.

And it was obvious it was the wrong choice.

“At the moment I’m not feeling too confident for tomorrow but let’s see what we can do overnight, there’s a lot of data to analyze,” said Verstappen.

“It was a really difficult race for us today, I honestly didn’t expect that type of performance.

“To be that slow in such a short race wasn’t great, maybe the mediums were slower than I expected they would be, but at that pace, I don’t know if the softs would have got me where we wanted.

“We need to understand why our degradation was so bad too. There wasn’t much I could do, the front and the rear were sliding around a lot – I had no grip. At the moment I’m not feeling too confident for tomorrow but let’s see what we can do overnight, there’s a lot of data to analyze.”

His teammate Sergio Perez had a similar story.

“There is plenty to analyze tonight because today wasn’t great, it was a poor afternoon out there. For some reason we had higher degradation than we expected and generally the car balance wasn’t there.

“I was expecting a lot more pace and it was very difficult to make any progress, I couldn’t fight with Lewis or Carlos ahead of me, and in the end I couldn’t get close enough to Max.

“We are behind Mercedes and Ferrari this weekend, they are very strong and seem to have a lot more pace than us. We lost a lot of performance from FP2 to the Sprint race, I felt a lot happier this morning with the car.

“I think if we continue with this trend we could struggle in the race, so we need to improve, get back into our rhythm and understand what happened today. Hopefully we can turn it around.”