Max Verstappen revealed the story behind the radio message between him and his race engineer en-route F1 Japanese GP win.
It was a straightforward win for Red Bull’s Verstappen in F1 Japanese GP, a dominant one too where he won by over 12 seconds on his teammate Sergio Perez. It came after his retirement in Australia, as he bounced back in style.
But during the course of the race, there was another radio banter between him and his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase. It was related to Verstappen suffering from oversteer at that stage of the race after having understeer at the start of the grand prix.
“Yeah, maybe one or two clicks less is OK,” Verstappen said on the radio. Lambiase responded: “I won’t say I told you so, but understood. Thank you.” Post-race, the Dutchman noted how he went against his engineer to have a particular set-up in place.
But eventually, what his engineer had said was the right thing to do but Verstappen went against it where he was fortunate that it didn’t hamper his race. “I think it was a very, very good win,” he said. “It took a few laps to settle in a bit with the car, but I think we made some good changes to the car before going into qualifying, which then helped.
“So, yeah, basically after the first stint, some tiny adjustments were made to the car and that helped me then to feel even more comfortable and whenever I needed to go faster, I could. Whenever I needed to look after my tyres, I could. That’s always a very nice feeling to have once you’re driving.
“Medium tyres, Hard tyres… Possibly the Hard tyres felt a bit better, but overall, on both sides, I think we were very competitive. Regarding the radio, we had, well, not an argument, but he was like, ‘are you sure you want to do this?’ I’m like, ‘yeah, I’m pretty sure’. Turned out to be wrong. So he was right.
“But in a way, it also fires me up, because I’m like, OK, well, even I’m not entirely happy with the balance now, I’ll still try to be as consistent as I can be without shouting back at him. But we have a great relationship. And yeah, it works well like that,” summed up Verstappen, who stated of changes he made to better the balance of the car.
After Friday and even Saturday, Verstappen was not too happy with the race pace of the car. He talked about tinkering with set-up to find better balance which he did for Sunday’s race and it did help him to get over the line, even though he wasn’t 100 % with it.
“I was not happy up until basically qualifying, but then we did make some changes,” said Verstappen. “And yeah, of course, I cannot go into detail what we did, but it did help. And yeah, it made it a lot nicer to drive and a bit more under control. You always look at things that you can do better, but I think overall the biggest change is that we did change the car around and that then just gave me more grip.
” After Australia, I mean, not a relief, it’s just nice to win, and it’s nice, of course, to win here in Japan. It’s always an important race for us. You know, the fans, of course, we have a lot of support here, and it’s great, you know, to win here in front of Honda, and basically have three cars in the points as well. So, yeah, of course, Melbourne felt like a bit of a hiccup but what we did, that’s what we want to do, and that’s what we aim to do every single weekend,” summed up Verstappen.
Here’s how F1 Japanese GP panned out
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