Red Bull’s Max Verstappen has said his brakes and an overall lack of grip led to his underwhelming qualifying position in Bahrain.

After the heroics of his pole position in Japan a week ago, the Bahrain GP qualifying session proved a bump back down to earth for the four-time F1 World Champion as he could only manage the seventh fastest time.

Max Verstappen qualifies in seventh for Bahrain Grand Prix

Just a solitary point behind championship leader Lando Norris heading into this weekend, Verstappen’s seventh-place disappointment was only marginally assuaged by the fact Norris also had a poor qualifying, as the McLaren man could only manage sixth.

But while the McLaren MCL39 has proven the class of the field this weekend, Verstappen can’t say the same of his RB21 and cut a downbeat figure as he spoke after setting a best time more than half a second down on what Piastri had managed.

“Yeah, just the whole weekend struggling a bit with that, brakes, feeling, and stopping power, and, besides that, also just, yeah, very, very poor grip,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com, after the qualifying session.

“We tried a lot on the setup, and basically all of it didn’t work. It didn’t give us a clear direction in which to work. So, yeah, just overall, a difficult weekend.”

Added to his stresses was the fact that he flubbed his first flying lap in Q1, meaning he had no banker lap set as the time ticked down into the final minutes – the Dutch driver thus had to regroup and go again on a fresh set of soft Pirellis.

“Of course, not what you want, also to use an extra set [of tyres], but, with the problems that we had, you have to do that,” he said.

With Red Bull having turned things around after a poor Friday in Japan, and being unable to repeat the feat this weekend, Verstappen said the characteristics of the circuit are emphasising the weaknesses of the RB21.

“I mean, in Japan, it wasn’t good as well,” he said.

“But here, you just get punished a bit harder when you have bigger balance issues because the tarmac is so aggressive, the wind is also quite high, and the track has quite low grip.

“So everything is highlighted more.

“It is sensitive in general. But here, of course, because of the tarmac and general grip, it’s more difficult.”

With his hopes of seizing the championship lead away from Norris seemingly shrinking as a result of the lack of short and long-run pace in Bahrain, Verstappen is aiming to minimise the damage on Sunday.

“I’ll try to do the best I can,” he said.

“I hope that I can stay a bit with the Mercedes and Ferraris; naturally, I think the McLarens will pull away.

“But yeah, we’ll try our best and see what happens.”

One factor that may help Verstappen is the fact that he does have his teammate for company in the top 10, a situation that hasn’t been the norm in recent times. With Yuki Tsunoda in 10th, Verstappen thus has his teammate not far behind him, but the lack of pace in the car outweighs the positives of this, according to Verstappen.

“It depends if you have the pace, which I don’t think we have,” he said.

“So the positive is that we have two cars in Q3, but the negative is that we struggle for pace.

“It’s nice to have two cars in there, but we are too slow, and then it doesn’t matter.

“We have been poor in every condition but, in the very hot conditions, it was definitely even worse.

“You never know what can happen in the Grand Prix, but I think, on pure pace, it’s not going to happen.”

Read next: Sky F1’s Saudi Arabian GP plans clarified after wild Ralf Schumacher ‘boycott’ rumours