Max Verstappen has outlined that Red Bull’s pace in Singapore acts as a “little wake-up call” for the team, despite taking a podium finish.
Red Bull had expected to challenge Mercedes for victory at Marina Bay but instead Ferrari moved to the front, taking a 1-2 finish in a race dictated by pit stop strategy.
Verstappen had qualified fourth and profited from Mercedes erroneously attempting the overcut with Lewis Hamilton, which enabled the Red Bull driver to move into third.
But Verstappen was unimpressed by the outcome of the weekend.
“It was not good enough,” said Verstappen.“We came here to win and we clearly didn’t.
“I think [qualifying] was worse than [the race]. I would say it’s a little wake up call. From Austria onwards I would say it’s our worst race in terms of performance where we expected to be really good.
“I have a few ideas why it went wrong so we will analyse all of them and see if we can already be better at Sochi.
“The layout is not amazing for us but you can clearly see if the car is working through corners or not.
“I think here clearly in two corners the car was not working like I wanted it to, so we will go away and see what we can do better.”
Verstappen faced some late pressure from Hamilton but reckoned the Mercedes driver was never a serious threat to his podium place.
“My tyres were going off a little bit but I think it’s quite normal and his tyres were seven or eight laps better than mine, and with seven or eight laps to go I didn’t have any problems,” he said.
“It really started to be with four laps to go and then you could really see Lewis closing in, so I just had to make sure I had some good exits out of some crucial corners where I knew he was going to be quick and we managed to do that.
“I guess the people in the garage were a bit wobbly, I was just focusing on getting good exits.”
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