Max Verstappen triumphed for the third time in this world championship on the American circuit of Miami, after winning at Ferrari's home venue in Imola. The Dutch world champion and Red Bull still in second place in the drivers' and constructors' standings, which see Charles Leclerc and Ferrari first. In Florida last Sunday, Red Bull showed a better pace in the race, proving to be faster than the prancing horse.

The battle between the Austrian and Italian teams is getting tighter and tighter and after the Miami GP, where the RB18 seemed overall more competitive and faster than the F1-75 despite the all-red front row in qualifying, there was a lot of talk about updates and budget chap.

There were those who speculated that Red Bull had already spent most of the funds to bring several updates that have allowed them to catch up with Ferrari in terms of performance. Mattia Binotto, in an interview with Sky Sport F1 Italia, also opened up on the subject, commenting on the speed of the competitors:

"We have seen that in the last few races Red Bull have been faster by a couple of tenths and that means they have brought a lot of updates, which obviously involve costs. My hope is that from now on they will have less money to spend, because the economic availability with the budget cap is limited.

“But now we will go to Spain and bring some developments ourselves, hoping that they will be enough to make up for those tenths that we are missing.

"We know it will be a long fight with Red Bull, but we are leading both rankings and there are still a lot of races to go," the Italian said.

Ex driver and Red Bull boss Helmut Marko commented on the matter, saying to Motorsport.com that he doesn't think that Red Bull used most of the budget cap in this part of the season:

"I don't think so. We plan our updates in such a way that we always lose weight with each update, because unfortunately we still haven't reached the minimum weight. And we won't quite reach it with the next update either.

"I don't think we are in a significantly different position to Ferrari in this regard. Especially since I wonder what effect it has on them that Carlos Sainz has already crashed the car several times. That can't be cheap." he added.

"It's true that the increased logistics costs are a problem," he said. "But that doesn't just affect us, it also affects Ferrari and all the other teams."

Team Principal Horner added:"You've got to be very careful where you introduce your upgrades because of the budget cap restrictions this year," he said. "We've just got to make sure that we introduce something that is value for money."