Max on his catch-up race in China: “I had a lot of fun”
Published on 09 April 2017 by Mike Motilall
Max Verstappen saw his great catch-up race been rewarded with a third place finish. A flying start from P16, a good strategy and some nice overtaking moves brought the youngster the final podium spot. The Dutchman looks back on an exciting race.
“I am very happy to be on the podium. Starting from sixteenth, you have no reason to complain”, says Verstappen with a great sense of understatement. “It was a very good race for me and I felt very good in the car.”
The basis for the good result was laid down in the early stages of the race: “Mainly in the first lap, I overtook nine cars. After that I overtook some others and ahead of me others were going in to pit, so that worked out perfectly as well. For sure we made the perfect choices regarding the pit stops.”
Due to a safety car period on lap five, the entire field has to take te pit lane. Max didn’t stop for other tyres: “I didn’t stop the first time because I was not sure that would be the right choice. At a certain point I thought ‘now we need to do it’, because the team said that it had been a long safety car period because of the crash. Obviously I was not able to see how big the crash was. It was hard for me to call, but eventually it was a good choice.”
When the field was let loose again, Max was able to overtake Kimi Raikkonen quite quickly before making little work of team mate Ricciardo as well. “When I passed Daniel, I pulled away quite fast, but the car had too much under steer as I didn’t have much track time during qualifying to get the balance right. We had changed quite a lot on the car during the final practice before qualifying, but we were not able to test anything. That was not ideal during the race. I needed to tweak all the buttons a lot to even get some grip at the front. I lost a lot of temperature in the tyres that’s why I locked up with Vettel. On the straight, I was steering to the right just because my front left was completely gone, that’s why.”
Ricciardo came too close for comfort for Verstappen in the closing stages: “He stopped later, so he had fresher tyres. I knew I would going to have issues with my front left, so I tried to take things easy so I could get a better finish. In the end, it didn’t make that much difference, it was not working. It was a nice fight with Daniel and of course I am very happy to eventually still come in third.”
During the exciting fight with his team mate, Verstappen requested his race-engineer to stop talking. “He started talking to me mid-corner. So I told him to stop and leave me alone, I know what I am doing”, says the Dutchman with a smile.
Max remains modest with all the compliments he got regarding his overtaking moves: “I am just doing my thing. I just want to pass the cars ahead of me and luckily I could just do that today given the conditions. I had a lot of fun. You are able to brake late now, like in turn six, where I overtook Ricciardo and Bottas. It is difficult to follow one another, but this track is very suitable for overtaking and I like that.”
Despite the good result, Verstappen doesn’t expect the gap to Mercedes or Ferrari to have been closed: “It is of course a podium finish, but we are not able to make it to the podium based on raw speed. We need to work hard to be able to regularly make it on the podium. In any case, we maximized all we could.”
