Verstappen COTA bumps verdict
Max Verstappen called the surface at Circuit of The Americas "out of control" on Thursday and did not dress it up as a routine racing complaint. The Red Bull driver said the bumps are not natural, that grinding the asphalt here and there is a plaster over a bigger problem, and that the real fix means opening up the track and rebuilding what sits underneath.
He arrives in Austin for Sunday's United States Grand Prix with back-to-back wins, his first two victories of the season. The mood in the media session was not a victory lap. "I'm not really looking forward to that to be honest, for your spine," Verstappen said. "I was joking about that in the last race but it's not really a joke."
His reference point was the World Endurance Championship running at the same venue, which he described as "extremely badly bumpy". He also conceded the setup puzzle: finding the right compromise around a circuit where some sections punish the car far more than others, with no clear read on how the Red Bull will respond.
The spine check behind the complaint
Verstappen said medical checks had shown that "the bottom end" of his spine "doesn't look that great". He framed it as accumulated damage across several seasons of cars rather than the product of one weekend in Texas.
"I know that's part of racing. I know that can be part of sport, but it's of course also further damage from the cars that we had the last few years. Now, if we continue with finding this acceptable to drive on, then you are going to suffer with that much more."
He was careful to separate the layout from the surface. Verstappen called COTA one of the best layouts on the calendar and Austin one of the best host cities, then argued that the soil excuse does not hold — if the ground is the problem, reinforcement should have been part of the original build. His conclusion was blunt: the bumps are "unacceptable", and the only real remedy is expensive and slow.
Norris and the headache tablets
Lando Norris, the reigning world champion, said he takes headache tablets before running at certain tracks because of how hard the car hits the headrests. He also made the regulatory point that matters for the long term: a brand-new circuit would not be signed off with tolerances anywhere near this.
"It certainly doesn't fit anywhere close to what those regulations are now, but it's an old track, not a new track," Norris said. He added that drivers have raised it many times and that there is a limit to how much complaining changes anything.
Russell on ride heights and repaving
George Russell took a softer line on COTA itself — "it's bumpy, but I think it's just part of racing" — before widening the argument to the standard of surfaces across the season. Tarmac coming up and falling apart, he said, causes more problems than it solves, and he wants resurfacing on a two-year cycle for consistency.
His technical explanation is the clearest version of why this hurts. Formula 1 cars run roughly 10mm off the ground at the end of a straight, so every bump goes straight into the chassis. Since the switch to 18-inch wheels, the sidewall that used to act as a damper has shrunk while the rim has grown, removing a layer of suspension the cars no longer have.
What the Austin weekend will test
The practical question is setup. A bumpy lap forces teams to soften the car for mechanical grip and ride the kerbs, which costs aerodynamic performance and makes the balance harder to hold across a qualifying lap. Verstappen's uncertainty about how the Red Bull will respond is the honest version of that trade-off.
Beyond Sunday, the pressure lands on organisers and the FIA. Verstappen's argument is that patching is cheaper than rebuilding and that patching has now run out of road. Norris's argument is that the current rulebook would reject this surface outright. Both point at the same thing: the cars have changed, the tyres have changed, and the ground has not.
The original report is from skysports.com.
