Verstappen struggled: "Part of the floor flew".

Red Bull Racing made a strong impression in the opening weekend of Formula 1. The team of Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez were miles behind Mercedes in recent years, but this season that seems to be changing. In Bahrain not everything went well, Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko explained.

Verstappen managed to take pole position during the first race in Bahrain. He held onto that position for the first lap, but a Mercedes undercut eventually allowed Mercedes to take the win. Although Red Bull made an excellent impression, Marko feels there's still room for improvement.

"In qualifying, everyone could see that a part of the floor was flying," he said Formel1.de. "That made a small change and as a result we lost maybe eight per cent downforce. That in itself didn't matter much. Much worse was that we had a problem with the differential at the beginning of the race. As a result, we solve drastically in the first sector, up to three tenths per lap."

Not only Verstappen had to deal with this incident, Pérez also complained about the problems with the car. The spinning of the rear wheels even caused both drivers to suffer from hot tires and that certainly did not help their race.

"In the first stint we didn't manage to build up the lead necessary to make an undercut impossible. In fact, we had 2.5 seconds at one point and our differential problem reduced that gap to 1.7 seconds. That proved to be the decisive phase of the first stint, a phase where we were clearly handicapped." Despite the problems, Verstappen achieved a rock-solid final classification with P2.