Max Verstappen had a very bad weekend in São Paulo and now says his hopes of winning the 2025 Formula 1 title are over. Things started to go wrong during the sprint race, where he finished fourth after starting sixth. Verstappen was clearly unhappy on the radio, complaining a lot about his Red Bull car. His engineer even had to calm him down.

Then in qualifying, things got even worse when he was knocked out in Q1 and will start 16th on the grid. It was his first Q1 exit since the 2021 Russian Grand Prix.

“We need to understand what our problems are, first of all. It’s not been good. We don’t really understand why it’s going this way. There’s just no grip,” said the four-time world champion, quoted by RacingNews365.

“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.

“Something is clearly not working for us, even with the changes in the setup. Normally, you would feel some kind of reaction, but there wasn’t. Something is just really off.”

After winning three of the last five races and finishing on the podium in the other two, the sudden drop in performance surprised everyone. Verstappen said that nothing they tried made any difference.

Now 39 points behind Lando Norris, who won the sprint race and will start Sunday’s race from pole position, Verstappen admitted that his title fight is over. “We can forget about that,” he said.

“From where we are starting, it’s not going to work, and with these kinds of performances, forget about it.” He added that even though he won last year’s race in São Paulo from 17th, those were “different circumstances” because of the wet weather.

Verstappen also said the team tried many things to fix the RB21, including running two different floor setups, but nothing helped. “There are so many things that we need to get right, so we’ll look overnight again to try something or understand something. But something is just not switching on in our car at the moment,” he said. “Definitely something is off, and we don’t seem to understand how to fix it at the moment.”