The four-time world champion endured one of his toughest days of the season at Interlagos, failing to progress beyond Q1 for the first time since 2021 and admitting that Red Bull’s pace simply “wasn’t there.”

“I can forget about that,” Verstappen said when asked about his championship hopes after the session.

When pressed if he really meant it, he replied, “Yes, for sure. Where we are starting, that is not going to work. And with these kind of performances, I mean, forget about it.”

Verstappen’s elimination capped a miserable day for Red Bull, with teammate Yuki Tsunoda also knocked out in 19th — the team’s first double Q1 exit since 2006.

Verstappen’s frustrations had already been mounting earlier in the day after finishing only fourth in the Sprint, losing further ground in the standings to Lando Norris, who went on to claim pole position for Sunday’s race.

The result extends Verstappen’s deficit to the McLaren driver to 39 points in the championship.

Speaking after qualifying, Verstappen struggled to hide his disbelief at how far off the pace he had been.

“It was just bad,” he told Sky Sports F1.

“I couldn’t push at all. The car was all over the place, sliding around a lot.

“So, yeah, I had to underdrive it a lot just to not have a moment and that, of course, doesn’t work in qualifying.”

 

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Verstappen explained that despite significant setup changes between sessions, nothing improved the RB21’s handling.

“The whole weekend has been already quite tough, but this is a bit unexpected I would say after changing quite a bit on the car,” he said.

“It was just not responding, I had no grip out there, so I had to really massively underdrive it basically and it just didn’t work.”

The Dutchman said the team was at a loss to explain what had gone wrong.

“We need to understand what our problems are, first of all,” Verstappen said.

“It’s not been good. We don’t really understand why it’s going this way. There’s just no grip.

“We changed a few things on the car, and it didn’t work, so that’s something we need to figure out because nothing really seemed to work, and we just don’t understand.”

He added that even when making adjustments, the car gave no feedback.

“Something is clearly not working for us, even with the changes in the setup,” he said.

“Normally, you would feel some kind of reaction, but there wasn’t.”

Red Bull’s struggles were compounded by Tsunoda’s comments that the pair had gone in similar setup directions, though the Japanese driver denied that was the issue.

“We made a change in the sprint race, which gave us a good idea to make the car better, we thought,” Tsunoda said.

“He also took the set-up that I was using. Now, I don’t want to blame my set-up, because I think the set-up was OK, the main thing is we didn’t make the tyre work.”

Verstappen’s qualifying woes mark a dramatic turn in a season that had briefly swung back his way after four wins in five races earlier in the year.

But the reigning champion conceded that his chances of a fifth consecutive title are all but gone after another setback in Brazil.

“Something is just really off,” he said.

“Definitely something is off, and we don’t seem to understand how to fix it at the moment.”

Norris backs up Sprint win with Sao Paulo GP pole, Verstappen out in Q1