Red Bull showed their ability to bounce back during the Qatar Grand Prix weekend after a tough start.

Despite struggling with his car’s balance and qualifying sixth for the sprint race, Verstappen managed to take pole position for the main race, although a penalty later dropped him to second.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner admitted that the sprint race struggles pushed the team to take risks and make big adjustments to help Verstappen feel confident again with the car’s balance.

“It’s a great turnaround. I think the engineers and the team back in Milton Keynes have worked very hard,” Horner told Sky Sports F1.

“They’ve got a good set-up on the car, Max has immediately felt [more confident] – his first comment was that it feels better.

“And then he’s just gone out and delivered in the most spectacular way.

“We pretty much threw the kitchen sink at it; pretty much everything you could change, we did change.”

He also explained how key set-up changes helped turn things around, especially for Max Verstappen with Sergio Perez’s difficult weekend giving Red Bull a chance to experiment.

Qualifying 16th for the sprint, the team decided to make the Mexican start from the pit lane and make major changes to his car’s set-up. While Perez’s results didn’t improve much, the information they gathered was crucial for Verstappen’s qualifying run.

“We made a few changes to Checo’s car, taking him out of parc ferme,” Horner explained.

“That’s definitely played a part in what we’ve done here for qualifying.

“Obviously looking at the data, there were three corners that we were really bad at yesterday: Turn 1, Turn 2 and the last corner. We managed to address that today.”