Verstappen pleased Red Bull’s lead remains despite rivals bringing more upgrades

Max Verstappen is encouraged Red Bull have maintained their lead over their rivals despite bringing fewer upgrades than them so far.

The team has won every races so far this year. While Ferrari, Mercedes and Aston Martin have all brought significant upgrades for their cars, Red Bull has only brought more modest revisions to its RB19 to date.

Despite that, Verstappen still led last week’s Austrian Grand Prix by such a comfortable margin he was able to make an extra pit stop at the end of the race to take fresh tyres and score the bonus point for fastest lap.

“We’ve had a great start to the year,” Verstappen said in response to a question from RaceFans in Silverstone. “We are also understanding our car race after race a bit better – what we want, what we need.

“But we are not standing still. It is true that maybe other teams, they speak a bit more about updates and bigger upgrades from one to the other race. But we’ll still bring some stuff as well because that’s definitely necessary to stay ahead, I think.

“It is definitely a good sign that we’ve done less than some of our competitors, I think that’s quite clear, and we still have a good margin. Of course some tracks it’s a bit bigger than others. But overall, it’s a strong base package, I think we have, we just always have to make sure that we get all the potential out of it.”

Having won the Canadian Grand Prix by less than 10 seconds, Verstappen enjoyed a more comfortable margin of superiority in Austria. He said their car performs better on permanent tracks such as the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, where this weekend’s race takes place.

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“I think that’s just how our car works. Street circuits, a lot of bumpy tracks, I think our car is not that fantastic. That’s why I think also the margin was a bit smaller of course in Monaco.

“Probably it wasn’t fantastic in Montreal as well, for example. And we know that there is still a few street circuits coming up where potentially it will be, again, a little harder for us.”

Verstappen is hopeful of another victory this weekend having missed out on wins at this track due to debris last year and a crash in 2021.

“Sometimes you have a bit of bad luck like last year,” he said, “but we know that our car is probably better and more competitive than last year. So I’m just looking forward to the weekend to be honest and hopefully we just have a good result.”

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