I know it looks really bad, but actually the potential is there. The car was too low at the end so it caused bouncing. Yuki wasn't running as low so could do laps. He was only 4 tenths from pole. That means Max could have been there with a better setup. It was already scraping too much in the medium tires but Max set the fastest lap on the medium tires in SQ2. The tipping point to undriveable was the softs tires. Soft tires caused the speeds to increase which lowered the car further, triggered more bouncing, and destroyed the ride. The skid was on the ground into T4 which removed load from the front tires and caused the understeer. Then the car was damaged over the gravel so 2nd lap was irrelevant.
Similar to Mexico, the ground clearance will shift into a sweet spot for the sprint race because the laptimes will become 4 seconds slower. Everyone will become higher, but Max was lower than them, so will lose less (in theory).
They'll have to refine the setup further for the main qualifying, but this is not surprising. This is not a car that can be set from 1 hour of free practice.
Verstappen was disappointed, and explained to Sky Sports: "It didn't go well from the first lap. I was bouncing terribly, and I suffered from aggressive understeer, which turned into oversteer in the fast parts."
