Max Verstappen says Red Bull’s title hopes were hurt by form ahead of the summer break, as he started the final triple header of the season 49 points behind.
Lando Norris has a commanding lead over Verstappen in the standings heading into this weekend’s Las Vegas Grand Prix, while Oscar Piastri is 25 points ahead of the defending champion with three rounds to go. Verstappen was 104 points behind Piastri after the Dutch Grand Prix, but a run of three wins and second place in four races brought him back into the frame before finishing third behind Norris in each of the final two rounds and slipping back.
“Very different tracks, so it’s hard to know [if the car will be competitive again] To be honest,” said Verstappen. “I think we are still struggling a bit with the tires, so it will depend on the track layout and temperatures. We can get it in a good window, but not always. That’s what we need to focus on. We will focus on that in the coming races.
“What are we – now 49 points behind? So it’s also… I mean, we haven’t lost the championship [in Brazil] or whatever. We lost the championship from race one to Zandvoort. We had many weekends where we just weren’t fast enough. Then of course you have a big gap.
“Then we had some nice moments where you get some points back, but not enough. That’s how the season goes.”
Verstappen won’t even talk about the championship heading into Las Vegas now that he’s almost two race wins behind Norris, but he’ll be hoping to challenge for wins if Red Bull can learn from his impressive race-day turnaround in Brazil.
‘Let’s not use that word [championship] at the moment, because there are too many points to really have a good chance at that. If you look at the whole season, we gave away too many points from the beginning to the middle of the season.
“For us now until the end it’s trying to have these highlights, have good race weekends and see what we can do until the end. A lot of things I think we also want to analyze from the whole weekend, but at least the race [at Interlagos] was promising.”
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