A frustrated Isack Hadjar blamed Red Bull’s clutch design for his poor start in the United States Grand Prix.
Hadjar fell from third place to fifth at the start of the race. He went on to finish sixth.“The clutch needs a redesign because at the moment it’s too fragile, it’s not coping well with temperatures,” he told Sky. “It is a real struggle.”
“I do everything perfect in terms of procedure and then I just have clutch over-delivery,” he added. “These things that are just out of my control, it’s starting to piss me off.”
However Hadjar said the clutch wasn’t the only problem he had to cope with. He complained about the team’s decision to switch him to the hard tyre compound for his second stint.
“I have poor radio coverage, I can’t hear what’s happening like in the pits,” he said. “Then I leave the pits with the wrong [settings] map and then I’m losing a second a lap every lap on that hard tyre.”
Hadjar’s team mate Max Verstappen, who finished third, also had a list of problems after his race, including a poor start.
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“It was just the same always in the start, the problem that we have,” he said. “But then the pace is just probably not where we wanted it to be.
“Also I think, for whatever reason, the softer compounds this weekend didn’t really seem to work that well in the race for the first time in a long time. So we were just on the wrong tyres.
“Also I think the way that we used the tyres in the races was the wrong way around, so very quickly it gave away that we had to do a two-stop.
“Then the whole weekend already the power unit has not been consistent, so lap after lap, corner after corner, I’m having different kinds of problems with my engine braking or shifts as well, so I cannot be consistent. That makes it of course very difficult.”
But having won the two grands prix prior to this weekend, Verstappen does not think his car was quick enough to take three in a row.
“Even if we would have done the tyres in the right order or chosen the right compounds, I don’t think we had the pace of Kimi [Antonelli],” he said, “but maybe we could have been second.”
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