Verstappen takes sixth straight podium in Austin but slams Red Bull's starts, strategy and radio failures

Max Verstappen finished on the podium for the sixth consecutive race at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, extending his run since a crash at Zandvoort to ten podiums across the 2026 Formula 1 season — yet the result left him visibly frustrated with a string of compounding errors from Red Bull.

“It was pretty frustrating, to be honest, just not a really good race for us,” Verstappen said in the post-race press conference, pointing to strategy miscalculations, power unit inconsistency, a slow pit stop, and two problems that have dogged the team all year.

The weekend had shown early promise. Verstappen posted an impressive Q2 lap that suggested pole position was within reach, only to lose grip inexplicably in Q3. His race pace, based on practice data, appeared strong enough to challenge for the win, but the team’s tyre strategy unravelled as the softer compounds — which had been Red Bull’s weapon in recent rounds — failed to perform at COTA.

“For whatever reason, the softer compounds were not really working that well today. Then also, I think the way that we used our tyres was wrong, the order of the stints,” Verstappen said. “I think at one point, it was quite clear that the people on the harder compounds were finding a lot of grip, so I guess we didn’t really react to that. We were probably sticking a bit too much to our belief from the last two races, where the softer compounds were the fastest. But clearly here, that didn’t work.”

Team principal Laurent Mekies acknowledged the misjudgement after the race. In recent weekends, Red Bull’s ability to manage softer tyres within the correct operating window had been a key differentiator for the RB22, making the Austin reversal all the more costly.

Beyond strategy, Verstappen flagged erratic power unit behaviour as a separate drain on his race. “We had too many issues with the power unit, where it was just very inconsistent behaviour around the corners. Every lap and every corner, the behaviour was different. You can’t build up a rhythm, you can’t build any kind of consistency in the car. And then I had a slow pit stop as well, so yeah, too many things today that just didn’t go well.”

Underlying those race-specific issues are two problems that have persisted throughout the season. Red Bull’s starts have been a consistent weak point — Verstappen described them bluntly as “consistently s**t” — and radio communication has repeatedly broken down, with both Verstappen and teammate Isack Hadjar experiencing failures in Austin. The radio troubles prompted Verstappen’s sardonic suggestion that the team consider an alternative: “We should use sign language.”