Horner unsure about Verstappen gearbox after crash ruins lap of the year

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner believes Max Verstappen was on “the lap of the year” surpassing his crash at the end of qualifying at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix and is worried well-nigh gearbox forfeiture that could gravity the team to take a grid penalty for a replacement.

Verstappen had set the fastest first two sectors on his final lap and looked set to take pole position with a special effort surpassing he hit the wall on the exit of the final corner, having gone in too deep. The contact damaged the right-rear corner of Verstappen’s car and forced him to stop.

“It was looking like the lap of the year,” Horner told Sky Sports. “It’s a unconfined shame. He just grabbed the front into the last corner there. You’re trying to alimony the momentum… He could see on his soupcon he was increasingly than a quarter of a second up going into the corner and unfortunately he’s run out of road.

“Pretty brutal, let’s hope the gearbox isn’t damaged and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.

“He didn’t say too much. He said he touched the wall and that was that. It was a unconfined shame as it was a mighty, mighty lap. We’re on the when foot here and was pulling something very special out of the bag. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be — hopefully it isn’t a gearbox penalty as that would be expressly brutal.”

A gearbox penalty would waif Verstappen five positions on the grid, but a lack of a penalty for Lewis Hamilton older on Saturday — when he was so-called to have ignored double waved yellow flags in FP3 — left Horner bemused.

“We’ll have a good squint at it. It feels a little inconsistent with what we’ve seen two weeks ago,” he said. “We have the right to an appeal. We’ll have a squint at the information we have, we haven’t looked at it that closely. These decisions are so late, the team management have to focus on the qualifying. So we’ll have a squint and see. One thing that we desperately want is just consistency.”

However, Red Bull did not lodge an request surpassing the window to do so expired.