Max Verstappen believes his poor sprint qualifying performance at the São Paulo Grand Prix could be "down to a few parts" on his Red Bull, having only been able to set the sixth-fastest time.
The Dutchman's F1 drivers' championship rivals, the McLarens of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, will start the sprint from first and third, respectively, leaving the 28-year-old considerable work to do.
His difficult grid-setting session followed an underwhelming sole hour of practice at Interlagos, where he was only P17 — but only used the hard compound of Pirelli tyres, unlike all the quicker drivers.
Reflecting on his disappointing result early in the weekend in Brazil, Verstappen told Viaplay: "You can't make much of that. I would actually have preferred to have watched as well!"
The 68-time grand prix winner revealed he immediately did not feel comfortable in his RB21 from the start of the sole hour of practice.
Lamenting the car's lack of responsiveness to his steering inputs and braking, the Red Bull driver suggested it could be due to certain parts being used, which he feels could be responsible for his wayward pace of late.
"During a sprint weekend, people very often drive different programmes in the first practice, or they use different tyres," Verstappen explained. "But right away, it didn't feel quite the way I wanted. That was actually the same in Mexico.
"The car is not running well. It doesn't respond very well to what I want when I turn the wheel. I can't brake very well at the moment. And that's kind of the problem. So we do have to analyse what is going wrong there, since Mexico."
"I think maybe it's more down to a few parts on the car. You're always trying to improve things. Maybe we didn't quite get a few things right the last two weekends after all.
"Of course, I can't go into all the details because there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes at the team that you work on. We need to take some time to analyse everything and see what did work. Then maybe we should start using that again."
With four rounds of the campaign remaining, Verstappen trails Norris by 36 points and Piastri by 35. Whilst the main opportunity will be in Sunday's grand prix, he will want to prevent losing ground in the sprint.
So impressive in adverse conditions in São Paulo 12 months ago, the four-time F1 drivers' champion does not believe the potential bad weather will play into his hands.
"No, at the moment I don't have that much hope, with nothing really," he said. "Dry, rain, high wind, low wind, 30 degrees, 15 degrees. Right now, I'm not thinking about anything for a while, in this area."
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