Max Verstappen admits it is “something incredible” that he has matched Ayrton Senna’s 41 career victories with his win in the Canadian Grand Prix, but he is hungry for more.
Senna and Verstappen are now level in fifth place on the all-time winners list, with only Alain Prost, Sebastian Vettel, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton with more. The Dutchman’s latest victory came with a relatively comfortable run in Montreal and he says it’s a proud moment to match the Brazilian legend’s tally.
“When I was a little kid driving in go-karting, I was dreaming of being a Formula 1 driver,” said Verstappen. “I would never have imagined I would win 41 grands prix. So of course, to tie with Ayrton is something incredible. I’m proud of that, but I hope it’s not stopping here. I hope that we can keep on winning more races.”
With Sunday’s victory Red Bull also reaches the milestone of 100 race wins, something Verstappen similarly views as a stepping stone to greater things.
“I’ve won 41 of them! We’ll talk about maybe a new contract because of that… No honestly, it’s a great achievement for the team. We knew that this was the first opportunity of course to do so and I’m happy that that’s done. We’ve won 100, but again I hope we win more than 100, so the new target is 200.”
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Verstappen — who hit a bird early on that remained stuck in the car — was pushed hard for much of the race by Fernando Alonso before eventually winning by over 9s, and he believes the closer nature of the race was due to multiple factors between Red Bull and Aston Martin.
“To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect from the track or whatever — nothing to do with competitors or whatever, just for myself as well — because we changed the car quite a bit compared to Friday, so I didn’t really know how it would feel today, but luckily it went in the right direction.
“I think it was quite tough today to keep the tires in the right window. They were always running quite cold, so we had to push actually quite hard on the tire, and then with low grip, low rubber, it was not the easiest and most straightforward. Everything went well, maybe just the hard tire stint was a bit of a limitation because (of the) harder compound — even harder to keep the tire temp… And I think we know that normally our car is very good when it’s high deg compared to other cars.
“Today probably you would have needed a car that is a little harder on the tire to keep the temperatures in, so it’s probably not been our best race today, but still to win by 9s shows that we’ve got a great car.
“From our side, I don’t think it was our best day because of the tire temps and stuff, so that doesn’t help. But I also know that with (Aston’s) updates, they naturally improved, so of course they got closer to us.”