Max Verstappen said that the race between a Red Bull Formula 1 car and a Racing Bulls Formula 1 car at the Dutch Grand Prix shouldn't be happening. During most of the Zandvoort race, Verstappen and Isack Hadjar, driving for Racing Bulls, were third and fourth behind the McLarens. Both of them finished on the podium because Lando Norris retired late in the race.

Of course, I'm happy to be on the podium, but my speed wasn't good," Verstappen told Dutch F1 station Viaplay. "I think the only reason I finished third in the race was because I qualified well. My speed just wasn't there.

Even though the McLarens were on hard tires at the end of the race, Verstappen's fastest lap was still 0.650s slower than Oscar Piastri's. He felt bad and said, McLaren is on another level. That's not even close to what I am. 

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Verstappen Red Bull-Sister Team confrontation shouldn't be happening.

At the start, Verstappen quickly took second place from Norris, but Hadjar followed him the whole race. Hadjar always had more than three seconds on Verstappen, which is why the four-time world champion was worried about his performance.

According to him, the whole race was a race between his team and our sister team based on speed alone. That really shouldn't be happening. That's not good at all. But in a way, we know that our car has those issues.

Due to short set-up windows, Red Bull has had a hard time this year getting the most out of its RB21. Verstappen's plan at Zandvoort was different from those of his competitors because he didn't use the hard compound in the race because it really felt terrible in practice on Friday.

The 27-year-old said, Absolutely no mechanical grip. But other people can drive on that tire but not us. That also means something is wrong. We were having a lot of trouble with slow turns, so that's why I used the soft and medium tires. They give a little more mechanical grip there.

The car is too slow. Plus I had to save a lot in those fast turns. Everyone else gets through Turns 7 and 8 a lot faster than I do. That's clearly not a good thing. It was better over one lap in qualifying, but this season the car just isn't good in the race.

Verstappen thinks Red Bull's Zandvoort crash speed reduction is due to the car's slowness.

The car just isn't fast enough, Verstappen says about Red Bull's slow speed after the Zandvoort crash. Verstappen and Red Bull are likely having their first season without a championship since 2020. Meanwhile, Racing Bulls has already scored 60 points, which is the team's best total since its record-setting 2021 season.

At that point, Pierre Gasly had competed in 18 Q3 races and finished in the top seven 12 times, giving his team 142 points in the standings. But Red Bull was in the running for the title, so the two teams from the brand weren't competing with each other as much as they do sometimes this year.

This is made worse by the fact that Red Bull's second car is having a terrible time getting any useful results, no matter who drives it. Japanese racer Yuki Tsunoda stopped a seven-round streak of not getting a point at Zandvoort, but he regularly lapped one second slower than Hadjar, and traffic didn't help him either.