Max Verstappen warned against inflated expectations as a result of his dominant victory in the Italian Grand Prix, saying it doesn’t mean Red Bull will suddenly be competitive at every venue.
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McLaren had won each of the past five races by comfortable margins, with only a reliability issue for Lando Norris in Zandvoort preventing that run including five one-twos. At Monza, where Red Bull struggled a year ago, Verstappen took pole position and delivered a dominant drive to win by over 19 seconds, but he says that performance won’t translate to the remaining tracks this season.
“I think it’s still a bit track-dependent,” Verstappen said. “Here you drive low downforce. It always seems like our car is a little bit more competitive when it’s low to medium downforce.
“So it’s not like suddenly now we are back; it’s not like we can fight, I think, every single weekend. But the positive is that we seem to understand a little bit more what we need to do with the car to be more competitive. So I hope that that just carries on into the coming rounds as well, and some tracks will be a bit better than others.”
Red Bull did bring an updated floor to Monza, but Verstappen believes it is a change in engineering approach that has unlocked more performance in recent weeks.
“Up until now we’ve had a lot of races where we were just shooting left and right a little bit with the setup of the car, like quite extreme changes,” he said, “which shows that we were not in control. We were not fully understanding what to do.
“I think with Laurent [Mekies, team principal] having an engineering background, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers, common sense questions, so I think that works really well. You just try to understand from the things that you have tried at one point. Some things of course give you a bit of an idea of a direction and that’s what we kept on working on.
“I would definitely say I felt that in Zandvoort already, we took a step that seemed to work quite well. And then here another step, which felt a little bit better again.
“Before, it felt like you were a passenger in the car. We had some races where it was just not balanced. And now, finally, there was more balance in the car and then the tires also behave a little bit more normal.”
While buoyed by the result, Verstappen also felt his margin of victory was exaggerated by McLaren’s strategy, and that he did start to lose tire performance earlier than the chasing pair.
“I would say the pace was probably a bit better than expected, but once I got back in the lead, I just tried to focus on my own pace and it kept on going well,” he said. “I would say only the last maybe six to eight laps of that [first] stint I started to struggle a little bit on the medium. But up until that point, it was nice for once. The car was doing a little bit more what I liked.
“It just seems like this weekend has been another step forward with the behavior of the car and that also then shows in the race, I think. So that was a big positive for us.
“We did a bit more of a normal strategy, medium–hard. Of course, McLaren stayed out to try and gamble for the safety car, and I think that’s why the gap is a little bit bigger than it should have been.”
