F1 | Verstappen: Red Bull must make sure the car dominates not only in Austria
Max Verstappen believes the team must work on the car to ensure that it will dominate not only on one track, but across many, ahead of the Silverstone GP.
In the championship standings, Max Verstappen is currently 32 points ahead of Lewis Hamilton, a lead he was able to score in the back to back races at the Red Bull Ring in the past two racing weekends. From the beginning, the young Dutchman absolutely dominated on the track - he did not only score pole position twice, but also lead all of the 142 laps of the two GP’s, and also got the fastest lap in the Austrian GP that marked his first grand slam in F1.
In a recent interview Verstappen said that although he is of course “enjoying” how the season has been progressing so far, he believes that Red Bull must keep working on the car to make sure they will be able to repeat the successes they’ve had in Austria. Their dominance at the Red Bull Ring caused Lewis Hamilton asking for updates for his W12 car, as he failed to win any of the past five races.
As Max said: “I’m also focused on the rest of the season. It is still so long, and there are still a lot of points you need to score. We need to make sure that every single weekend we are back up there and we basically use the whole potential of the car.
“We had a good car in Austria especially, I think it was just very dominant. But we have to make sure that in Silverstone we are there again.
“That’s what we will look into now, again to make sure we are very competitive there.”
The upcoming British GP will not only mean final updates for the W12 car of Mercedes, but will also host the debut of the sprint race weekend format. Silverstone has been previously a very strong track for Mercedes, and naturally quite of a challenge for the Red Bulls. Even though Verstappen won the 70th Anniversary GP last year that was hosted at Silverstone, the Team Principal of Red Bull Racing Christian Horner believes it will still be a hard weekend for his team.
As he said: “Now we head to a circuit that has been really very much a Mercedes stronghold for the last seven years. It's a different challenge with the sprint race introduction, a different format that weekend. Obviously, Mercedes have been enormously strong there over the years, and, Lewis has his home support as well.
“So we expect it to be a big challenge.”
