Max Verstappen said he was not annoyed by the virtual safety car in the closing stages of the Mexico City Grand Prix which stopped him from attacking for second place, saying he has benefited from suspensions in the past.
The defending champion closed a significant gap on Charles Leclerc in the second stint of the race, which the race engineer described as “insane”, and was within DRS from the penultimate lap. However, Carlos Sainz stopped in the stadium section, VSC had to push his car behind the barrier, and the race only resumed on the final lap after Leclerc and Verstappen had passed the key overtaking spots.
“No, I’m not that (frustrated),” Verstappen said. “I mean, in my career, the safety car has been very kind to me sometimes. So sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That’s what racing is like. I think it would have been fun to the end. Well, it might have been a little more fun for me than it was for Charles to defend, but I think it was a fun ending for everyone to see.”
Verstappen was the only driver in the top eight to start on medium tires and admitted he was surprised no one followed his strategy, but he also admitted he did not expect he would have the pace to fight for the top three given Red Bull’s struggles in Mexico.
“Personally, I didn’t expect to be on the podium,” he said. “I don’t think it looked that way too much in the first stint either. I mean, at the time I thought we were just slow and struggling with the tires. Certainly, after that, if we had changed to softs and everyone else had mediums, I think everything would have looked a little more competitive.”
“We’re still not at Lando’s level considering the race averages, but the soft was definitely a better compound for racing and everything felt a little better. Overall, it was really good to be third in a difficult weekend for us.”
Verstappen got off to a good start, attacking for the top three positions, but was wide off the field at Turn 1, then got involved in a tussle with Lewis Hamilton, and fell back to Olly Bearman’s Haas in the first stint.
“The start of the race was very hectic for me,” Verstappen said. “I had a really good start and then I had a really long run to Turn 1 and I was on the outside, three or four wide, so I bottomed out on the curb. I just kept bottoming out and almost hit the grass.”
“A lot of things happened after that. Everyone around me was on soft tyres, I was on medium and I looked like I was struggling a bit. I was trying to survive the first stint and go as long as I could on that tire… Once I put on the soft tyre, I was a little bit more competitive, a little bit happier. It was a difficult weekend for us, but I think it’s still very good to be able to fight for P2 considering everything that happened in the first few laps.” Result. “
Despite the result closing the gap on the championship leader to 36 points with Norris replacing Oscar Piastri, Verstappen said the performance showed how difficult it would be for him to win this year’s title.
“When you look at it that way, we lost 10 (points) to Lando,” he said. “I said before the weekend that everything had to go perfectly to win, but this weekend it didn’t go perfectly.
“It’s going to be a tough situation, but let’s think about what we can do at other tracks. Of course we hope that we never experience a weekend like this again, but still, all scenarios show that we are not fast and that is something we need to understand a little better.”