Max Verstappen was asked in the Hungaroring paddock on Saturday whether Red Bull’s latest technical mystery had finally left him desperate. His answer has done the rounds ever since.

“Desperate? That word doesn’t even exist for me anymore. I’m already past that stage.”

The context was another qualifying session in which the RB22 had done something the team could not immediately explain.

Verstappen described the car as “completely broken” aerodynamically, said every lap in qualifying “just was worse and worse”, and spun at the final corner of Q3, as GPFans reported.

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The bit nobody in the garage expected

Sunday made even less sense than Saturday. Verstappen finished second, ahead of Kimi Antonelli and behind race winner Lando Norris, per the official Formula 1 classification.

His own reading was that he had no reading of it.

“I still don’t really understand how we are second,” Verstappen told reporters, calling the podium “a bit of like overperformance to what we expected”.

The car, he said, had felt identical to qualifying. “The car was just extremely oversteery, just dragging quite hard.” He called it one of the hardest races of his season in terms of how it felt in the cockpit.

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A new problem every weekend

Red Bull’s own data pointed to worsening aerodynamic behavior through Q3, and Dutch outlet De Telegraaf, quoted by GPFans, described the team facing “a new unexplainable problem almost every race weekend”.

Early in Sunday’s race, Verstappen radioed the pit wall about issues with his gearshifts, Formula 1’s race report noted.

Lewis Hamilton, meanwhile, picked up a five-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane, which dropped him from fourth on the road to fifth.

The result nudged Verstappen to 109 points, sixth in the drivers’ standings and 110 points behind championship leader Antonelli, whose Mercedes team-mate George Russell sits third on 160. Antonelli’s lead over second-placed Hamilton is 50 points.

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Verstappen’s own summary of the afternoon, delivered to Motorsport Week, was “incredible”. Then he walked out of the paddock still unable to explain the number next to his name.

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