Verstappen takes a dig at Perez: 'McLaren has two cars'

Sergio Perez has just signed a new contract at Red Bull Racing, but that did not improve his performance in Canada. In qualifying, Perez was out in Q1 and in the race Perez crashed resulting in a lot of damage.

In the press conference, Norris and Verstappen were asked about McLaren's improved form. The Woking-based team has taken more points than Red Bull Racing in the last few races. Verstappen, however, could not hold back and shouted: "But they have two cars." With that, Verstappen took a big dig at his teammate. Lando Norris added to that.

"I think it's between Ferrari and us. We'll keep pushing. I think that's one of our biggest strengths at the minute. We have two drivers, as McLaren, who are up there not making mistakes and getting pretty much everything out of the car every single weekend. It's rare that there are not many other teams on the grid that have such a thing."

"For us, it's more out of what we can do against Ferrari. Again, we've been a more consistent team coming into this weekend. They've had some mistakes and just struggled a little bit more for whatever reason. But at the end of the day, I think two is going to be better than one, in Max's case. We're doing a good job, but we still need to keep pushing on and try and bring more upgrades and things like that, because with Mercedes joining, it's only going to make it harder to score big points like we did today."

Verstappen critical of Perez

Verstappen was then asked if he wanted to comment further on it: "Yeah, of course. I think the damage was done yesterday [Saturday qualifying]. It's very hard in these conditions. I saw him retire with the damage. So I knew that I had to score big, of course, to not let the other teams catch up a lot.

"At the end of the day, as long as you keep winning, you score 25 points, even if the others finish P2, P3, you don't really lose out too much. And then you kind of can afford, sometimes, these one-offs. But of course, naturally, we always want the two cars to be out there. And I also have no doubt that that will change very soon again. We just need to work on our car, to be honest, to make it a bit easier to drive and to feel a bit more comfortable. And then I'm sure that we have both cars back up there like we had at the beginning of the season."