Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko has warned the Formula 1 paddock that the Austrians haven’t yet “fully exploited” the performance from their new upgrades, which were introduced last weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Red Bull introduced a major upgrades package at the Hungaroring, which saw the side install new sidepods to the RB19.
As a result, the outfit were expected to increase their advantage over the field to an additional two-tenths per lap; however, this wasn’t the case in qualifying.
For just the second time this season, Red Bull were beaten to pole position.
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Lewis Hamilton pipped Verstappen to pole by three-thousandths of a second, to the delight of Mercedes.
Whilst he was delighted to claim a 104th career pole, Hamilton was left pondering how Red Bull had been beaten given their new upgrades.
The Briton even suggested that the Austrians have “slowed down” a lot this year.
“Honestly, I think they’ve slowed down quite a bit from the beginning of the year,” Hamilton said after qualifying, as reported by PlanetF1.com.
“I mean, they’ve still got the DRS, they don’t have the DRS advantage all of a sudden that they used to have. Where did that go?
“But I mean they’ve just had an upgrade, so we expected them to have taken another step. We heard it was around two-tenths or something like that. So for them to not have been able to extract that in qualifying is interesting.”
Verstappen proved on Sunday that Red Bull are certainly not getting slower, as the Dutchman claimed victory by over 30 seconds.
Red Bull were sensational during the race, with the RB19 having been much more balanced on Sunday than it was on Saturday.
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Whilst Red Bull’s one lap pace might be getting caught, their race pace certainly isn’t.
Concerningly, Marko even stated after the race that there is more to come from their new upgrades, ahead of this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix.
“On Saturday, we did not find the right balance during qualifying,” Marko told Sky Deutschland. “[In the race] we did, but we have not yet fully exploited the potential of our upgrade.”