Max Verstappen warned of bloated expectations as a result of his dominant victory in the Italian Grand Prix, and says that this does not mean that Red Bull will suddenly be competitive in every location.
- Race Report: Verstappen dominates while the Italian Grand Prix breaks the fastest race record
McLaren had won each of the last five races with comfortable margins, with only a reliability problem for Lando Norris in Zandvoort that that Run did not prevent, including five One-Twos. In Monza, where Red Bull struggled a year ago, Verstappen took the pole position and delivered a dominant urge to win with more than 19 seconds, but he says that the performance will not translate this season into the remaining tracks.
“I think it is still a little track-dependent,” said Verstappen. “Here you drive low downforce. It always seems that our car is a bit more competitive if it is low to average downforce.
“So it is not that we are suddenly back now; it is not as if we can fight, I think, every weekend. But the positive thing is that we seem to understand a little more what we have to do with the car to be more competitive. So I hope that will continue in the coming rounds, and some tracks will be a little better than others.”
Red Bull brought an updated floor to Monza, but Verstappen believes that it is a change in engineering approach that has unlocked more performance in recent weeks.
“Until now we have had many races where we were just photographing a little left and right with the arrangement of the car, such as fairly extreme changes,” he said, “who shows that we had no control. We did not understand something to do.
‘I think with Laurent [Mekies, team principal] With a technical background he asks the right questions to the engineers, common sense, so I think that works really well. You just try to understand the things you tried at some point. Some things of course give you a bit of an idea of a direction and that is what we continue to work on.
“I would certainly say that I had the feeling that we were already taking a step in Zandvoort that seemed to work. And then a step here, which felt a little better again.
“It used to feel like you were a passenger in the car. We had a number of races where it was just not in balance. And now, in the end, there was more balance in the car and then the tires also behave a bit more normal.”
While he was stimulated by the result, Verstappen also thought that his victory margin was exaggerated by the strategy of McLaren, and that he started to lose tire performance rather than the pursuit couple.
“I would say that the pace was probably a little better than expected, but once I came back to the lead, I just tried to concentrate at my own pace and it continued,” he said. “I would only say six to eight laps of it the last one [first] Stint I started to struggle a bit on the medium. But until that moment it was fun once. The car did a little more what I liked.
“It seems that this weekend has been a step forward with the behavior of the car and that you can also see in the race, I think. So that was a big positive for us.
“We have done a little more a normal strategy, medium -hard. Of course, McLaren did not try to gamble for the safety car, and I think that is why the gap is a bit bigger than it should have been.”
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