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Max Verstappen continued his podium streak with a third-placed finish in Austin, but that wasn't enough to satisfy him or team-mate Isack Hadjar. Verstappen held onto his podium spot despite a late charge from Lewis Hamilton, but the Dutchman showed more rage than relief even before he got out of his car after taking the chequered flag. "Terrible. The pace, the wrong tyre, s*** pitstop, s*** engine braking – nothing worked," was his verdict over the radio while he trundled back to parc ferme. Not exactly a rave review of his car, or Red Bull's execution.
He was no more diplomatic in his media interviews. He accused Red Bull of putting him on a tyre strategy that he didn't agree to before the race, said their execution was "a disaster" and bemoaned their ongoing radio problems, quipping that it might have been easier to communicate with race engineer Tom Hart "in sign language".
Verstappen was unhappy also with another poor launch off the line, which affected both cars and saw them lose positions at the start of the race. Like with the radio, it has been an ongoing theme of their season and has left Hadjar in particular frustrated.
The Frenchman was so annoyed by the poor start he suffered that, like Verstappen, he produced plenty of colourful language to the point Sky Sports had to hold his interview until they could edit it to bleep out his swearing before it was safe to broadcast.
In one of his more family-friendly comments, Hadjar said: "The race starts – I did everything on my side. Clutch overdelivery, completely out of my control again. It's really starting to p*** me off. It's not a nice feeling when you know you're going to drop the clutch and you don't know what you're going to have."
Hadjar added he felt he could have had "a brilliant race" if not for the poor launch off the line, which dropped him behind both Ferraris that started behind him on the first lap.
Between the starts and the radio, Red Bull have plenty of work to do away from the track. Team principal Laurent Mekies offered hope that they might be able to find a way to better communicate with their drivers on track, but warned that significant performance improvements, including new parts to facilitate better launches, will not come until next year.
Mekies said: "We don't fully understand why we are being hit by these issues. Certainly, I have to admit that the competition is doing a better job than us, because we can obviously hear everyone's radio, and we have been struggling more than what we would have liked to.
"It's making everyone's lives very difficult, so it is true that it's something that we would like to fix quite quickly, because it's an item that should be working without using too much of our energy."
On the starts and Red Bull's other performance deficits, Mekies added: "As much as we have reduced the gap to competition, and you may remember how bad our starts were at the beginning of the year, we are still not the benchmark.
"The fact that the car in the meantime improved a lot, and is fighting closer to the front, makes that deficit even more painful now, because competition around us is very strong.
"On one side I'm confident that we will continue to reduce the gap to the competition from now to the end of the year, because every race we learn, every race we come up with small ways to close the gap.
"On the other side, I equally know that we will not be the benchmark before the end of the season, that it will require some significant design and hardware changes, and that this is something that we will see only next year."
Big moments. Packed grandstands. A championship battle that’s heating up.
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