F1 News: Max Verstappen Angered By Hungarian GP Changes - "Completely Rubbish!"

Changes to qualifying has not gone down well this weekend.

The recent changes to the qualifying format in Formula 1 have not been warmly received by Red Bull driver Max Verstappen. He expressed his stark dissatisfaction during an interview with Viaplay, even going as far as to describe it as "rubbish".

The novel format being piloted in Hungary mandates drivers to qualify in Q1 using hard tyres, transition to mediums in Q2, and it's only in Q3 that they're permitted to utilise the soft tyres, denoted by their red ring. 

The outcome? Teams end up striving to conserve several sets of tyres, both for the qualifying rounds and the actual race, so as to avoid having to compete on previously used tyres.

Verstappen didn't mince his words when he declared: 

"I really think it's completely rubbish.

"I was talking about it [during the first two free practice sessions] with my engineers. We stayed in for 15 minutes, because I only had one set anyway."

This weekend, the unspoken rule among teams on the Friday and Saturday was to preserve tyres. Verstappen explained his view: 

"You have to save your tyres for qualifying and the race, because that is the most important thing. If you use the tyres in free practice, you have nothing left for the race.

"Everyone has to be extra economical with the tyres and that's [not fun for the fans either]. The free practice sessions are actually there, of course, to use at least two sets of tyres."

Expressing his desire for Formula 1 to test a different approach, Verstappen made his dissatisfaction clear again, stating that the current experiment wasn't amounting to anything worthwhile. 

"Sometimes they like to make it extra difficult, and that's [the case] again now with this format. I think it's really ridiculous, but we have to put up with it and they have to figure it out," he expressed.

He strongly believes that the officials need to reassess the situation and come up with a better solution.