Nobody, not even a grid penalty, could stop Max Verstappen at Spa – How he and Red Bull team boss Christian Horner explain the dominant performance
Max Verstappen drove in a league of his own at Spa. Despite the handicap of a grid penalty, he took the lead again as early as lap twelve. Of the 1071 World Championship races held so far, only eight have been won by a driver who started further back than he did from P14 in Spa.
The Red Bull driver had already dominated Saturday’s qualifying session by six tenths of a second. So it’s no wonder that when asked if it was the most dominant race weekend of his Formula One career, Verstappen replied, “I think if you look at the complete weekend, yes.”
“The car was incredible from the first free practice. I don’t think we expected it to be like that. But sometimes it’s nice to be positively surprised by something. It’s been really fun to drive the car here this year. “
“Hectic” start phase survived without damage
He was aware that it wouldn’t be easy from 14th on the grid, especially on the first laps: “Of course I knew that you shouldn’t risk too much with our car. Then it’s even harder to stay out of trouble.”
“It was very hectic in front of me,” he recapitulated the first kilometres. “People were going into the gravel and coming back onto the track. And I was really just trying to stay out of it. But you don’t want to lose too much time. Then there was Lewis. His car seemed to be broken and he was holding everything up. “
“Obviously everyone is trying to take advantage of that. It was super hectic and there was also so much dirt that I pulled off my breakaway visor because I could hardly see anything because of the previous sector, because everyone was driving on the grass, on the gravel. But we got through it without any damage,” Verstappen said.
“When things calmed down because of the safety car, I was literally overtaking a car every lap,” he continues. “Then when I was in P3 and saw that my soft tyres were holding up quite well, I knew we could win the race. “
Normally teammate Sergio Perez is known to go easy on the tyres, but in the first stint Verstappen’s soft tyres lasted longer than his medium tyres.
“I think I’m always good with the tyres,” the world champion said when asked about it. “Maybe people don’t pay that much attention to it. It’s just understanding, experience and trying to set up the car as good as possible. And sometimes the car responds better to that and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“If you look at Austria, for example, we didn’t do so well, but I think we learned from that. And we tried to apply that. But as I said, when the car is working so well, everything becomes easier,” the Red Bull driver knows.
Red Bull team boss: “Simply phenomenal “
This is also underlined by team boss Christian Horner when he sums up Spa: “I think this track has played to our strengths. We have a very efficient car, we found a very good set-up. Max was just in phenomenal shape.”
“Of course it was a strategic decision to take a grid penalty here. And with all the other penalties, it wasn’t quite as bad. But Max still had to make his way through the field and he did that very efficiently in the first laps. He got to the front much quicker than expected. “
Tyre performance was also crucial to this. “We went for the soft tyre even though the temperatures were much higher,” Horner explained. “We didn’t know how that would affect the relative performance of the car.”
“It was at least 10/15 degrees hotter than the previous day. And we know how sensitive these tyres are. So it was difficult to predict, but the performance advantage we saw in qualifying continued in the race.”
“The pace we had with Max and also with Checo was enough to pass Carlos and probably put in one of the most dominant performances we’ve had as a team since 2010 or 2013. And I don’t think we’ve ever won a race from 14th on the grid.”
Asked about the Ferraris, the Red Bull team boss analyses, “Carlos looked the quicker of the two drivers this weekend. And Charles (Leclerc) was obviously unlucky to have a breakaway sight caught in his brake channel.”
“But he just didn’t have the pace. You can understand they were trying to get that one point,” Horner said, addressing Leclerc’s late pit stop for the fastest race lap. “But even with DRS, a soft set of tyres and probably 30 kilos less fuel than Max, he was no quicker.”
The extra point remained with Verstappen, who had set his fastest time at the start of the final stint. That’s why Horner’s answer to the question of whether Leclerc would have been a danger without the aforementioned problem is clear: “No, I don’t think so. “
