Max: “Maybe I should have waited, but I felt I could go for it”
Published on 03 September 2017 by Mike Motilall
Almost two hours after he got out of his car, Max Verstappen takes his time to reflect on his race in Italy with Verstappen.nl. Despite the result, a tenth place finish, the race pace of the Red Bull Racing looked promising.
“We most certainly did well. To be faster than Ferrari is of course always very positive. The first lap was very good, as usual. I overtook five drivers, that’s always a good thing. The whole weekend went well, except the Sunday”, Max starts off the interview. On lap three, the Dutchman had a collision with Felipe Massa. That meant an extra pit stop to change the tyre and replace the front wing, which was a major setback for Max as he rejoined as last.
“After that my race was somewhat lost, but you try and make the best of it of course. Our race pace was good, there was nothing to complain about that, even though I had an enormous hole in the floor of my car and some damage on the side, causing me to lose some time. Despite that my lap times were good.”
Max elaborates on his collision with the Brazilian. “I wanted to get pass Massa of course, but he left me no room between turns one and two. After the race, you ask yourself if you couldn’t have done your overtake maneuver one lap later. On the other hand, you want to get pass as fast as possible. I wanted to go round the outside and saw that Massa didn’t leave me any space, but then it was already too late to react. The stewards decided that it was a race incident, I don’t care, my race was already over. That was a shame of course.”
Max reflects on the whole situation: “In hindsight, it is easy to say that I should have waited one more lap. Maybe I should have. But at that moment I felt that I should go for it. I am not someone to drive very conservatively, most certainly not with how my season is going so far. If you’re fighting for P3 or P4 in the championship, then you’ll race differently. If you have nothing to lose, you want to advance as fast as possible. This time it didn’t work.”
Max has high hopes for the next Grand Prix, Singapore in two weeks’ time. “I am very much looking forward to that, given how well the performance was in Monza. We will be getting a major update in Singapore, so I am very curious to see how we will perform there.”
