Max Verstappen reckons he would have been in F1 Belgian GP win fight without penalty, as he felt happy to be able to keep Lando Norris behind.
Having taken up the engine penalty, Red Bull’s Verstappen was forced to start from 11th on the grid in F1 Belgian GP at Spa-Francorchamps. He started off by making three places in the opening few laps, but then was stuck in the DRS train of similarly paced cars.
The strategy then played a role for him to jump places as Red Bull elected to pit early which forced others to react. Verstappen managed to jump McLaren’s Norris in the process along with Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and even his teammate Sergio Perez.
But he was stuck then in a train against the Mercedes pair of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton, McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. He had the better of Russell at one stage, but the decision to go for one-stop aided the Brit.
Verstappen had to settle for fifth which was converted to fourth due to Russell’s disqualification. The Dutchman reckoned he was certainly in a chance with a win if not for the penalty. He also opted for greater cornering speed after reverting to FP1 spec.
“I don’t think [if less wing would have helped], a the balance of the car wasn’t too bad always in the first few laps but I also ran a lot in traffic, which probably also didn’t help,” said Verstappen to media. “But we were just not faster than the cars around us and then you just get stuck in that DRS train.
“As a team, we maximised the performance. Naturally, if you start P1 with the pace that we had, I think you’re fighting for the win, regardless. But starting P11, I knew that it was always going to be a damage limitation race. Of course, looking at the championship it was still a positive day – I extended my lead, where it could have also easily been calculating losses. So, from that side of course, it’s a positive day.
“As I said, having an engine penalty, I think if all of the cars had that their race would also look very different. So, it’s not very fair to fully look at my race coming from P11. Because if you just start with them, the race is very different,” summed up Verstappen, who was pleased to have finished ahead of Norris at least in the title fight.
Any points gain for Verstappen is good for him at the moment, especially with the competition heating up. “I think he [Norris] didn’t have the best first lap, I don’t know what happened there,” he said to media. “But yeah, for me that is what I look at, naturally. A lot of the other guys, they’ve done great races, but they’re quite far behind in the championship.
“And for me, it’s with the car that at the moment probably is not the quickest in the race. It’s about just limiting the damage and trying to be as close as I can be every single time. That’s what we have been doing lately. And naturally, I would just hope that we can find a little bit more performance because it will make our lives a bit easier in the race.
“Of course, it was better to gain points than lose points. And today could have been either way because he [Norris] was very fast behind me. But at the same time, I was also hunting in front of me.We were also on two mediums and a hard. I think an extra hard tyre would have helped.
“f course, George won the race on a one stop, but I don’t think we had the tyre wear or tyre life to do that anyway. So yeah, also there’s a few things to analyse, but as a team today we did a good job. We definitely did the right thing with the strategy to try and be a bit aggressive initially to try and get ahead of a few [rivals] and it made my race a little bit better. But then too many cars where we got stuck with,” summed up Verstappen.
Christian Horner, meanwhile, was pleased with how Verstappen’s race panned out to secure the maximum of fifth which they had envisaged in the pre-race meetings. It ended up being an important result, since he only extended his championship lead.
“No one had a crystal ball that one stop was going to be the strategy that worked out,” said Horner to media. “So we were running just behind George on the same tyre, having pitted on the same lap with a set of mediums we felt actually that’s not a bad option to have because the degradation was lower than we thought.
“And I don’t think George set off in that race expecting to do a one-stop but congrats to him and Mercedes for making it work because I don’t think even they thought it was potentially going to work at one point. So it was a strange race because all the data from Friday pointed towards graining, high deg, the new surface here, and it was actually, whether it’s due to the temperature or whatever, it was actually the complete inverse where a one-stop won the race.
“No one could have envisaged that. I think that’s, and we never really got to run in clean air, we were always in dirty air, dirty air, dirty air. If we’d have started on the pole, potentially you could have won it. But we’ve got that engine penalty in the bag now, which puts us in a better place for after the break.
“So, Max did a good job, going from 11th to fifth, finishing ahead of his nearest championship rival who started fourth. He was only seven seconds from the leader. So in what is now a very, very tight grid, I thought that was the optimum, extending his lead in the drivers,” summed up Horner.
Here’s Christian Horner on Sergio Perez, Daniel Ricciardo
Here’s Red Bull trio on critical Belgian GP weekend
Here’s how F1 Belgian GP panned out
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