Red Bull returned from F1’s summer break on the back foot Friday at the 2026 F1 Dutch GP. Max Verstappen and Liam Lawson placed just 11th and 14th in practice. The team found extra pace for Sprint qualifying, however. Lawson will start 11th for the Zandvoort Sprint, while Verstappen made it into SQ3 and will start 6th.
Verstappen: “Let’s see what we can find”
The four-time World Champion snarkily summed up his session: “I guess we out-qualified one car?” His remaining remarks showed that the newly re-signed driver knows there’s speed to be found at his home track.
“Just a bit tricky to find the grip, the balance, I mean. It was already a step forward from FP1. But of course, still lacking a little bit to be a little bit further up the road. But it’s something that we need to understand, I guess, now what we can do with the balance for tomorrow. To find a bit more grip, really. I mean, yeah, a bit of balance, a bit of grip tclose the gap a bit.”
He assessed their track record at finding extra pace as “hit and miss, but I mean, let’s see what we can find. I cannot tell you right now.”
Lawson returns to Red Bull for 2026 F1 Dutch GP
As for Lawson, he is deputising for Isack Hadjar, who is out for at least this weekend with a wrist injury. This left the New Zealander needing to catch up on a short timeframe. Despite the result on short notice, Lawson was disappointed to not start the Sprint higher up.
Having outpaced the Dutchman in SQ1, he did not find a step in pace in SQ2 like those around him.
“Obviously it’s been an interesting day, but normally you’d improve through quali and we started SQ1 quite strong and then we didn’t make the same step that everybody else did. Obviously we’ll look into it, there’s a lot to learn today, but so far I feel quite good in the car. I was honestly feeling okay through qualy, I thought we’d get through, so it’s a shame.”
The result marks the third straight qualifying where Lawson missed Q3, after a string of strong runs going back to Monaco. “We’ll obviously try and fix it and put it together for [feature race] qualy. But we definitely had the potential to be right up there today, so it’s frustrating.”
