BUDAPEST, Hungary — Max Verstappen could not believe his own result. After a weekend of frustration, radio complaints about car issues, and qualifying only sixth, the Dutchman crossed the line in second place at the Hungarian Grand Prix — somehow finishing ahead of everyone except winner Lando Norris.

"How did I end up here? I was shocked. I'm actually still shocked," Verstappen said after the race, a rare smile breaking through his usual intensity.

The result masked a deeply troubled weekend for Red Bull. Verstappen had entered Sunday saying he "didn't expect to be on the podium," and throughout the weekend he complained of balance issues, shift problems, and a car he described as "aerodynamically broken." Team principal Laurent Mekies conceded the car had never been in its proper operating window all weekend.

"If I look back to drivers' feedback in Spa or in Austria, they would probably have said that the car was pretty much ballpark to how it should feel and to what it allows them to do," Mekies said Sunday. "That was never the case this weekend."

The RB22's limitations were laid bare at the tight, technical Hungaroring. Red Bull technical director Pierre Waché admitted on Friday there was "no confidence" the car would perform, saying: "With this new car, you see a different problem every time you go to the track, when you put the car on the ground. We try to maximize it, but no confidence."

Verstappen's best lap in second practice was nearly seven-tenths off Lewis Hamilton's pace. "We cannot make miracles and just make it step by step," Waché said after that session.

Yet despite everything, Verstappen managed to grind out a second-place finish. Benefiting from grid penalties for Hamilton and Kimi Antonelli, he gained two spots before the race even started. A stunning late-braking pass on Hamilton at Turn 1 during the second stint proved decisive. Even then, he remained unhappy with the car, calling it "one of the hardest races of this year in terms of how I felt in the car, how I had to manage the balance as well, corner to corner."

Team-mate Isack Hadjar faced similar struggles, finishing sixth after what he called a weekend where having a drivable car "was not possible." He pointed to downshift problems that "has been terrible" throughout.

Mekies made clear the team is far from satisfied. "Don't count on me to say that we are satisfied because we are not because we will not be satisfied until we go back to have a race car that has a pace to win on merit," he said.

Verstappen said the team's priority must be finding more overall performance before fixing the inconsistency issues. "We need to first find more overall performance," he said. "Then we need to fix our problems, where we sometimes just lose performance over a weekend, or even from the start of the race to the end."