Max Verstappen has produced the bluntest setup verdict of his 2026 season so far, telling Red Bull and reporters in Montreal that the RB22 is physically throwing his feet off the pedals over the bumps of the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
The Dutchman qualified seventh for Saturday's Sprint, a result that on paper looks survivable on a track where overtaking is plentiful. The numbers behind it tell a different story.
In FP1 — the only free practice session of the weekend in this third Sprint format of the season — Verstappen had set the early benchmark, a full second a lap quicker than anyone else on a dirty track, before being the only driver on the grid to commit to a 13-lap race-simulation run on heavier fuel. By the time everyone went out on softs for Sprint Qualifying, that gap had inverted. The two Mercedes were untouchable. The two McLarens slotted in next. Then the two Ferraris. Verstappen was eighth-quickest after Charles Leclerc and lifted to P7 only because his team-mate Isack Hadjar split him from the midfield.
Verstappen radioed his engineer mid-session with the kind of one-word verdict drivers rarely give in public.
"I struggled a lot with the car. It's jumping. My feet are flying off the pedals. That's why I can't power out of all the corners. We need to check that. It's horrendous."
"I'm not surprised. My feeling in the car was not very good. I was struggling a lot with just the ride of the car. So all over the bumps, I couldn't put my foot down. Actually, my feet were even flying off the pedals. So just made it very difficult to be consistent and that's something that we need to investigate."
The diagnosis points squarely at the new 2026 active-aero generation's most exposed weakness. The cars are stiffer in the regulated stiffness window, the ride-height tolerance is much tighter, and the energy-recovery system relies on consistent traction phases to harvest. A driver whose feet are bouncing off the throttle pedal cannot deliver clean traction phases.
Peter Windsor, dissecting the Friday on his analysis channel, noted that Verstappen's race-pace work in FP1 has been disguised by the consequences. Windsor suggested Max's one-lap speed had been hurt by spending the only practice session on race-fuel running rather than low-fuel set-up tuning — a deliberate trade Red Bull made because the kerbs in Montreal had already exposed something they could not ignore.
Windsor added the warning that mattered most for the Sprint itself: "Max did two or three practice starts today — one from the pit lane, the others from the grid — and still very slow initial take-up. So we'll see what happens going into turn one tomorrow with that."
That is the secondary problem for Red Bull. The pedal-stability issue is the headline. The launch issue is the one that risks losing places into Turn One of the Sprint and again into the first chicane of the Grand Prix.
For a championship Verstappen is no longer realistically chasing — Kimi Antonelli leads, with George Russell and the McLaren pair within striking distance — the Canadian Sprint weekend was supposed to be a quieter rebuild window. Instead, Red Bull are now diagnosing a chassis-ride problem with a single hour of practice already gone and the Sprint race itself the next thing on the timetable.
The word Verstappen used was "investigate." The word he didn't use, but implied, was "fix."
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/verstappen-feet-flying-pedals-canada-sprint-quali-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
