Red Bull having pit stop problems: 'Will definitely fix it'

Red Bull Racing opted to start Verstappen on the hard tyre from the back. On that tyre, Verstappen went quite far, eventually coming within five seconds of Lewis Hamilton, who along with some others was stuck behind George Russell. Verstappen went in at the same time as Lewis, while on hard tyres he might have been able to last longer. According to Max that was not an option.

More was not in it for Verstappen

"No, I had to… my tyres were done, just fighting and being in traffic… like so many cars. The left front was just done so in hindsight maybe it would have been better to start on the mediums, I don’t know, but I also didn’t expect the hard tyre to give up so quickly. In a way I think today was just very difficult on tyres, especially when you had to come from the back and then you have to clear slower cars," Verstappen said during the press conference.

"I don’t think we did anything wrong with the strategy, we just… the tyres were very limiting today in terms of what you could achieve. So even if the rain didn’t come and I would have finished seventh or sixth, I would have been like, well, that’s what it is because with the tyres we had today, the graining, there was not much more I could have done, coming from the back so all in all, then with the rain, we made the right calls but… It was fine. That’s what it is. And Fernando, yeah, he overtook me. He had better tyres, my left front was dead."

Pit stops by Red Bull

Although Verstappen's pit stop went a lot better this weekend, Red Bull Racing had another bad pit stop. This time Sergio Perez was the victim of a pit stop that lasted more than eight seconds. Verstappen, however, does not yet want to admit that his team is not good at it since the new regulations.

"I don’t know. I will look into it but it’s not… I mean two bad pit stops are not going to define how good we have been in the past so I’m sure we will fix these things," concluded the number two in the world championship.