Max Verstappen wants Red Bull to keep improving despite his dominant performance at the Spanish Grand Prix extending his run of victories to three races.
Red Bull has won every race so far this year but after seeing Sergio Perez perform well in Baku, Verstappen has hit back with wins in Miami, Monaco and now Barcelona. His latest success came after setting the pace in every practice session, taking pole position and leading every lap — as well as setting the fastest lap — but he says Red Bull shouldn’t become complacent.
“It’s a good period, but we have to keep on working and trying to find more performance,” Verstappen said. “I’m happy in the car and I think the last few race weekends have been definitely a lot more positive for me. But this is one weekend where I think it went really well, but we also know that maybe some other tracks it will not be like this. So still a lot of races to come where we have to perform really well to try and win the race.”
The only real challenge Verstappen faced on Sunday was when Carlos Sainz attacked him around the outside of the first corner, but from there on he was untroubled by any other rivals.
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“I think it was important…to try and keep the lead into Turn 1. I know it was quite tight but I actually had a really good start, and then from there I just tried to manage the pace on the medium. I knew everyone behind me mainly was on a soft and especially those last eight laps of that stint I could really create a big gap.
“Then we went onto the hard tire and I actually expected them to be a little better but somehow they didn’t have a lot of grip and I was actually sliding around quite a bit. Of course the pace was still OK, but I couldn’t really create much more of a gap like I would have liked. But then we just did the amount of laps we had to do on that tire and pitted for the soft and that felt a lot nicer to drive.”
There was also some slight chatter on team radio as Verstappen received a black and white flag for exceeding track limits — leaving him one error from a 5s time penalty — but he says it wasn’t a point of concern as he still went on to set the fastest lap.
“I went over the white line three times! It happens sometimes; some tracks it’s a bit easier to do and I was struggling a little bit with the harder tires to keep it within the white lines, but I knew once…I had that last warning that I had to keep it within the white lines, but it’s not an issue really.
“I kept it within the white lines, I just went a bit faster on the lap, so I didn’t do anything wrong. They don’t know how much pace I have in the car when they tell me, ‘This is the fastest lap, don’t bother.’ But I knew that I could do it, so I just had to keep it within the white lines, but this is something I think we can laugh about already. I was laughing about it with Helmut (Marko) after the race so I’m pretty sure that they’re quite happy.”