British Grand Prix: Max Verstappen has no explanation for poor pace

Following Toro Rosso's race pace in Friday practice, Verstappen suggested the team were the second quickest behind all-conquering Mercedes.

The Dutch 17-year-old complained throughout Q1 and Q2 regarding the handling of his car and ended up only 13th, while Sainz qualified eighth.

"I could feel at the start of qualifying the car was not behaving like it should be," said Verstappen.

"After the first two corners I had so much oversteer and wheelspin I destroyed the rear tyres. For the rest of the lap I had no rear tyres left.

"It was very strange. I can't really given an explanation as to what went wrong - oversteer, a lot of traction problems compared to P3 and the other practices.

"Something definitely was not right there. Normally you always improve, so we really have to analyse what went wrong because we don't want this in the race."

Verstappen has suggested a change of floor between P3 and qualifying may be to blame, but feels he should not have lost as much time as he did.

"We had a little bit of damage in P3, so we had to change the floor and maybe something went wrong there," added Verstappen.

"We were expecting seventh and eighth, so to be 13th is a bit strange.

"Despite that I'm still confident for the race. If we have some good first laps and the race pace is good then maybe we can overtake a few others."

Spaniard Sainz's qualifying was in stark contrast to that of Verstappen, with the 2014 Formula Renault 3.5 champion delighted to end up eighth.

"You may be a bit surprised after seeing us P5 and P6 (in FP3), but I will say 'sorry, I could do no more'," he said. "We extracted the maximum.

"If you see Ferrari as a reference, then to be a tenth off of [Sebastian] Vettel, that for us is something big bearing in mind the power deficit."