"I can forget about that," says Max Verstappen of title hopes following disastrous qualifying session.

The Dutchman's Interlagos nightmare continued as he failed to make it beyond Q1 for the first time since Sochi 2021, while title rival Lando Norris claimed pole.

Unfortunately it's not as if the four-time world champion can stage a miracle come back - as was the case last year - for the Red Bull is clearly at sixes and sevens at the Sao Paulo track this year.

"I can forget about that," he replied, when asked about his championship hopes in light of his disastrous qualifying. Asked if he really believed that, he said: "Yes, for sure. Where we are starting, that is not going to work. And with these kind of performances, I mean, forget about it."

"It was just bad," he subsequently told Sky Sports. "I couldn't push at all. The car was all over the place, sliding around a lot. So, I had to underdrive it a lot just to not have a moment and that, of course, doesn't work in qualifying.

"The whole weekend has been already quite tough," he admitted, "but this is a bit unexpected I would say after changing quite a bit on the car. It was just not responding, I had no grip out there, so I had to really massively underdrive it basically and it just didn't work.

"We need to understand what our problems are, first of all," he continued. "It's not been good. We don't really understand why it's going this way. There's just no grip.

"We changed a few things on the car, and it didn't work, so that's something we need to figure out because nothing really seemed to work, and we just don't understand.

"Something is clearly not working for us, even with the changes in the set-up. Normally, you would feel some kind of reaction, but there wasn't."

"We made a change in the Sprint race, which gave us a good idea to make the car better, we thought," added teammate Yuki Tsunoda. "He (Verstappen) took the set-up that I was using.

"Now, I don't want to blame my set-up," he insisted, "because I think the set-up was OK, the main thing is we didn't make the tyre work."

"Something is just really off," sighed Verstappen. "Definitely something is off, and we don't seem to understand how to fix it at the moment."

"Obviously, nobody expected something like that," admitted team boss Laurent Mekies. "We have been unhappy with the car since pretty much when we got here, and you heard our struggles through the practice session and Sprint, but nonetheless, we were at the point where we could not fight for the win but we could fight with the group just after.

"It's fair to say that we took some more risk before qualifying to try to see if we could put the car in a better place," he admitted, "and it obviously went the opposite direction. So, that's where we are now. It's sometimes the price you pay when you take a risk, you cannot always go your way. It's painful but it's something we can learn from and improve.

"We did take some risks," he added, "we did significantly change the car because again that's the sort of risk you need to take if you want to give yourself a chance to put the car back in a window where it could fight for something bigger than where we were this morning.

"As we said it went the opposite direction so now we are where we are but no I would not say it was frightening, it's bold changes, we have been bold in our approach for a long time, that's the way we go racing and sometimes it hurts."

Check out our Saturday gallery from Interlagos here.