'No guarantee yet that Verstappen's car is fully fixed'

There is no guarantee yet that the problem on Max Verstappen's car will be fixed before Sunday's race. Red Bull Racing chief engineer Paul Monaghan tells Formel1.de that the team will only know for sure during the race.

Verstappen crashed out in Q2 during qualifying on Saturday. After qualifying, Verstappen managed to report that it was a problem with the driveshaft. The implicit assumption was that Red Bull had everything under control and the problems would be fixed before the race.

During the driver's parade prior to the race, Verstappen did not worry about anything. "We will of course keep investigating it after this weekend, but for now it's all fixed," sounded the world champion's reply when asked about the problems.

Monaghan, however, takes a different view. "Honestly, we won't know until around 10pm tonight if we have fixed it," the engineer admitted. "We will test it publicly, which happens once every few weeks in Formula 1. We either succeed or we don't."

Monaghan further adds that the problem surfaced completely unexpectedly during qualifying. The team continues to investigate how much needs to be repaired and will see whether everything is OK or not on a race-by-race basis.