Max Verstappen expects a rough ride from the notorious bumps at the Circuit of the Americas this weekend.

The track in Austin, Texas has a reputation for being one of the bumpiest on the calendar. The race promoters have attempts to ease the bumps on several occasions and F1’s latest generation of cars are supposed to offer a less harsh ride than the ‘ground effect’ designs used last year.

However after watching footage of the World Endurance Championship round at COTA last month (below), Verstappen expects a tough time this weekend.

“From what I saw in WEC, the track is incredibly bumpy,” he said. “Oh my God, yeah, I’ll probably need to order a new spine, I think, after the weekend. I’ll become like RoboCop. That’s a new challenge for everyone, to deal with those bumps.”

Red Bull go into this weekend’s race as the favourites to win, having performed strongly across the three previous rounds. Verstappen has taken two grand prix wins, one sprint race win and second place in a grand prix over that time.

However he says the different characteristics of the upcoming circuits makes it unclear how competitive they will be.

“I don’t want to say now that I will be in the fight in Austin,” said Verstappen. “The last few weekends have been great.

“But I just take it race by race and once we are in Austin, then we’ll see how it will go there. It’s again a very different track.”

“From there we have to go to Mexico [which is] high altitude, everything will run super-hot,” he added. “We need to see how the engine is going to perform in that altitude, how the car is behaving, because it’s very different.

“So there are so many different things that you can get right or wrong in those races, but we’ll see.”

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