Max Verstappen after the US Grand Prix: “Constant rubbish… switching to hand signals”

Max Verstappen groaned after the United States Grand Prix: “It’s unbelievable how much went wrong in this race. So it’s actually quite astonishing that I ended up on the podium.”

Verstappen elaborated: “It’s all rather frustrating, to be honest – just not a good race for us. It’s very easy to say in hindsight, of course, but for some reason the softer compounds didn’t really work well today.”

“I also think the way we used our tyres in sequence was wrong. Besides, I think it became quite clear at some point that the drivers on the harder tyres were finding plenty of grip, and we probably didn’t really react to that either.”

“We probably just clung too much to our belief from the last two races, where the softer compounds were the fastest, and here that obviously didn’t work.”

“Then there were too many problems with the power unit, which resulted in very inconsistent behaviour in the corners – different behaviour every lap, every corner. You can’t build up a rhythm like that. To make matters worse, I had a slow pit stop. There were just too many things today that simply didn’t go well.”

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“Generally speaking, we’re not the fastest at high speeds, we’re not the fastest at low speeds, and I think perhaps here you either have to be very fast at high speeds or the fastest at low speeds. If you’re neither of those, you’re just a bit average, and I think we were just average in this race.”

What happened at the start? Max grimaces: “Our starts are consistently rubbish… So I couldn’t attack Kimi at the front, but got caught up in a battle with Leclerc. Charles accelerated from Turn 2 into Turn 3, so he overtook me on the outside, which was a good move.”

“I thought to myself: ‘Right, let’s just relax. We’ve still got a long way to go.’ But then we had a good battle from Turn 12 to 15 – really cool, good sportsmanship. I also had Lewis on my outside in Turn 6 on the first lap, so I had a bit of work to do there. But it all worked out; it’s fun when you can have a bit of a battle.”

More problems with the radio. Max continued: “It’s just… I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened this year. Maybe we should start communicating in sign language! It’d probably be cheaper too. It’s a disaster, a real disaster – truly frustrating.”