Max Verstappen insists that potentially losing out in the 2024 Formula 1 World Championship race “is not going to change my life”, adding that with the current performance of the Red Bull RB20 the matter is not in his hands.
Verstappen still has a healthy 70-point lead over Lando Norris, but the McLaren driver’s dominant win in Zandvoort indicated that he now has the momentum.
Verstappen insists that he’s not stressed by the current situation.
“Listen, I just do the best I can,” he said. “If I win it or not, it’s not going to change my life. Would I like to win it? Yes, of course. But it’s not in my hands with the performance of the car.
“I just try to do the best I can, try to give feedback, try to make it faster. If that’s going to be enough to the end of the year, I don’t know.
“But I do know that we’re going to give it everything we have as a team to try and be more competitive than what we showed of course in Zandvoort because that was, I think, just a very poor weekend for us, and just go from there.”
Asked if he is still enjoying this season he said: “I am enjoying it. Yeah. Would I like to win more? Yes, of course. But I also knew that a season like we had last year is very unrealistic.
“But did I expect it to be like this? Not really with, of course, how we ended and how we started. So now it’s up to us to just try and make it better. But I know that everyone is working flat out to make it better.”
Verstappen says a combination of factors made his home race complicated.
“The problems in Zandvoort with the wind and the rain, it was very difficult to get a bit of a read,” he said.
“But a different weekend now. Of course, besides the stuff that we want to try on the car, the track is quite different.
“So we also need to keep track on that to make the right to make the right calls. But we’re trying a lot of stuff to try and improve the balance of the car. “
Asked by this writer if his home race was a wake-up call for his team Verstappen disagreed.
“I wouldn’t want to call it a wake-up call,” he said. “It was just not the best weekend for us for different reasons. We couldn’t just get the car to work how we wanted it.
“Probably the wind made it very difficult for our car with the balance issues that we have. And it was just not the strongest weekend.”
Verstappen also downplayed the suggestion that correlation issues had hampered progress:
“For sure, some things might not have correlated how we wanted it, but in general I think we need to fix the general balance of the car, the behaviour.
“So this is something that crept in, and now we have to try and get rid of it.”
He added: “I think we are understanding where we need to find stuff, and what we see in the wind tunnel, what we see from CFD. That is not the problem.”
Adam Cooper F1 