Max Verstappen felt positive especially with the second stint performance in F1 Chinese GP, as Christian Horner backs the Dutchman and is awaiting analysis.
While the stories about the second seat goes on of Yuki Tsunoda potentially replacing Liam Lawson from Japanese GP onward, Red Bull is undertaking analysis of their performance from F1 Chinese GP, especially how Verstappen did in the race in the second stint.
He started off losing out to both the Ferrari cars. No matter how much he pushed, he couldn’t get close to the cars ahead until the later stages of the grand prix. He pushed Lewis Hamilton to pit in the second stint and caught up with Charles Leclerc to retake fourth from where he started.
He was flying in the second stint which he feels is positive for Red Bull. “To be honest, the first lap actually worked out nicely for me, because my pace is anyway not up to their standards,” said Verstappen to media. “So actually, to be immediately behind them was better, because I just drove my own pace like we set out to do my own thing unlike the sprint.
“Also in Australia I tried to fight, but then you degrade your tyres very aggressively. I just wanted to do my own pace, look after the tyres but at the moment, it is not the level of the others around me. But then on the hard tyre, it got a little bit better. In the beginning of that, I was still struggling for pace, and they drove away but at the end, the grip came up to me and we seem to be a little bit better.
“I focused on myself because I didn’t really expect to have any kind of battle. I mean, honestly, I just expected how the first stint played out. If I would just stick to my own pace, that’s what I did. But it was positively surprising, I would say, the second stint. Gives us a bit more hope and probably a direction as well, that they came to, but it’s a question of where we want to be if you compare to like McLaren, especially.
“But we were there, a bit more competitive, I would say. It’s impossible to say, because it might, it might not. We just keep working. We just have to stick together, push hard, that’s what we all do. I know that the team is working flat out. I never doubted that anyway. We just keep on trying to improve. There’s few things that might be the case but I prefer to look with the team into that before we draw any conclusions.
“I honestly don’t think it is related to fuel, I might be wrong but I don’t think so. The handling is exactly the same, it is just more tyre grip because before it was like nothing was responding and at the end, at least there was more response, so it is something that we need to understand,” summed up Verstappen. Team boss Horner backed the Dutchman in his analysis.
The first stint was nowhere for Red Bull but they came alive in the second. They made changes from the sprint, but they were not sure if it would work this good. “Obviously, there was significant difference,” said Horner to media. “On the medium, he came in the pits, about 18s behind the race leader and by the end of the race, he was 16s behind.
“In the meantime, he caught both Ferraris and passed Charles Leclerc, so I think the car was in a bit of window on the harder tyre. We went into the race, pretty much concerned about the front left as everybody did, expecting it to be a two stop. We had a lot of discussions after the experience of the sprint race where we degged quite heavily.
“We were very competitive early on but then degged quite a bit, so we decided to conserve the tyre for the back end of that first stint. With 20/20 hindsight, we saw the pace on the in-lap; we probably could have pushed that first stint quite a bit harder. I think that would have seen him racing, probably George at the end of the race.
“Particularly in the last third of the race, Max got a feeling, the grip came alive, the car came alive. And he was pretty much the quickest car on the circuit in that last third of the race. So, there’s a lot for us to take away and understand. We know we need to put performance on the car. It’s the second race in succession where the latter part of the race has been better for us.
“He was fighting to take the lead in the first half of the sprint race, and then we degged badly, which affected how we then approached it [the grand prix]. We made some changes to the car, [and] we definitely improved the deg for the race. But I think we spooked ourselves slightly with the level of deg that we had in the first stint.
“We had a plan going into the race to manage that and then it transpired that it was a completely different scenario. I can’t believe any team in the pit lane thought it was going to be a one-stop going into that race based on what we saw [in the sprint]. In the end, it was very comfortable. We’ve got a lot of information, a lot of data, and feedback from the driver.
“In the second stint, you could see – just have a look at the lap times, last third of the race. And particularly, you even look at his last lap – it was very competitive. Why was it competitive? What drove that competitiveness? What does he need in terms of switching on the grip? It’s not a balance issue so much that he’s struggling with, it’s just about extracting more from the tyre.
“We leave the first two races eight points behind in the Drivers’ Championship, second in the drivers’. We know we’ve got performance to find, the whole team’s working very hard, very focused on that. I think we’ve taken a lot of information out of this weekend and now with the two-week gap to Japan, we need to try and make sure we come back fighting hard there,” summed up Horner.
Here’s race start: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2025-chinese-grand-prix-piastri-leads-from-pole-as-norris-jumps-russell.1827367910236875162
Here’s Christian Horner on Liam Lawson situation
