Max Verstappen credited his Red Bull Formula 1 team for making the right decisions en route to second in the British Grand Prix on what could have been a “really bad afternoon.”
Verstappen poached third from Lando Norris at the start of the Grand Prix but as the opening stint wore on and rain started to fall, the Dutchman found himself falling backwards, behind both McLarens and into the clutches of Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.
However, Red Bull was able to elevate Verstappen past George Russell and Oscar Piastri through the first round of stops when intermediate tyres came into play.
The reigning Formula 1 World Champions then pitted Verstappen on the hard tyre for the final stint, one lap ahead of Norris, who switched to softs.
This call gave Verstappen the tyre advantage to pass Norris with a handful of laps to go and chase Hamilton close in the final moments of the 52-lap GP.
“Yeah, the beginning was not very good,” Verstappen told media including Motorsport Week.
“I tried to keep up but I just ran out of tyres. I mean, everything was running hot and I just struggled for grip.
“So then Lando got by, then Oscar got by, it started to rain. I had no grip as well there, I didn’t want to take too much risk as well because I just, it didn’t feel good, it didn’t feel comfortable.
“And so I just, yeah, I was like, I’ll just sit here and try to survive. And yeah, that’s what I did.
“At one point even Carls rocked up with the party. So I was like, Jesus, really bad afternoon.
“But then yeah, we just kept it on track, made the right calls from the slick to the inter and then from the inter back to the slick tyre, which just basically kept me in contention really.
“I mean, by making the right calls today, we were there at the right time and to the end with the hot tyre that was the right call for definitely.
“So we could push on the tyre because of the medium already wasn’t good enough for us.”
Verstappen admitted that to go full gas until the end, pushing the hard tyre “was the best” Red Bull could do.
Given that, in his own words, “it was looking like P5 or P6 even,” before Red Bull’s strategy nous came into play.
“So yeah, on a poor afternoon, I would say in terms of performance to be second, I take that,” he said.
A lot can change in Formula 1 in the space of a week, including driver relation to team strategy and Verstappen’s case at Silverstone is a prime example.
Just one week prior Verstappen was lamenting Red Bull for not allowing him to take his final stop earlier in the Austrian Grand Prix and perhaps the right calls at the Red Bull Ring would have granted him an easy win.
At Silverstone however, Verstappen and his team were on the same page and the Dutchman relayed how he and his engineer Gianpiero Lambiasse collaborated to achieve the best result possible.
“It’s a constant discussion that I have with GP, you know, with the radar, he tells me the information he has as well as he can and then as a driver, of course, at one point, if you don’t feel like, you know, you can continue on a slick or you think now it’s time to go to the inter, you have to shout over the radio that you’re coming in,” Verstappen said.
“So that’s what we did and then it’s the same from inter to slick.
“Of course, the team can sometimes help you a little more with that if someone is on a slick already.
“But at the end of the day, the sun was coming out, the track was still drying up quite quickly from the last few days even.
“And [we] took a bit of risk, you know, not being 100% sure this is the right lap, but we went for it and it was the right lap at the end of the day.”
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