
Home ground, home hero, huge pace advantages – Whole objects was given a great advantage to Max Verstappen, and he perfectly consumed all benefits to top podium like a champion. The Max become youngest ever F1 driver who made 50 podiums reached at his age 23 years, 277 days by Sundays wins at Red Bull Ring.
After the dominant victory, the Dutchman heavily extended his drivers’ championship points lead over the defending world champion Lewis Hamilton, who finished on the fourth place following the floor damage. Red Bull Racing extend its lead over Mercedes to 44 points in the Constructors’ title, Max by 32 points in the Drivers’ title.
Verstappen extremely praised his machine RB16B, which has amazed him at Red Bull Ring. He also admits that, never expected shocking pace-advantage from his car.
“Yeah, incredible to be honest. The car was on rails.” Max said following the dominant victory.
“On every tyre set we put on it was really enjoyable to drive. Pretty insane. I’m a bit amazed myself how today went.”
“I didn’t expect it to be like this. Incredible job by everyone to deliver something like this. Of course when you go into the weekend everyone sees you as the favourite but it’s never easy actually to always deliver what we did today. A great effort by the whole team and also by Honda. I think the whole package… These two weeks especially here have been incredible. ”
“Yeah, I mean, I knew that Lando also had good speed, so I had to make sure that I had a good restart. I think it was alright. Of course I also had to defend a bit for Checo so that made my Turn 1 a bit easier. Then of course the draft is a bit gone. But you have to be focused of course to make sure you do a good restart.” Max said regarding the secure restart after the Safety Car period.
A great motivation by Orange army – Max
“It was insane today to see all the fans here first of all and of course so much orange, it was just incredible. A great motivation as well, especially on the last lap, the in-lap, there was a lot of orange all over the track, so yeah, thank you very much for coming.”
Following secures the victory number five in this season and 32 points ahead of Hamilton in the title standing. The dutchman describes about the ride this wave of success. “I’m enjoying it, but I’m also focused on the rest of the season. It is still so long and there are still a lot of points you need to score.”
“We need to make sure that every single weekend we are back up there and we basically use the whole potential of the car. We had a good car here in Austria especially, I think it was just very dominant, but we have to make sure that in Silverstone we are there again and that’s what we will look into now again to make sure we are very competitive there.”