Max Verstappen says he still needs to figure out where to overtake if he is to beat Lando Norris to victory in Formula 1’s Spanish Grand Prix.
Verstappen qualified third at Madrid’s new street circuit, just over a tenth slower than polesetter Norris and Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli.
Asked if he could challenge the McLaren for victory, the Red Bull driver was skeptical, given how tricky overtaking is expected to be at Madring.
“It will be tough,” he said. “I mean, even, let’s say, best-case scenario, you are faster, you can’t pass. There are no corners where you can pass. So, you need to rely on people deg-ing very aggressively.
“The long runs were very tough, a lot of [tyre] deg for everyone, so that will be probably the key point tomorrow. But even with that, I need to still figure out a corner where to pass.”
Verstappen was fairly satisfied with his qualifying performance. In terms of lap time deficit, this is the closest he has been to pole position since Monaco, where he was just 0.043s down on Antonelli.
“It was alright," he said. “I haven’t been here so much this year in the top three, so for me I think we had a good qualifying.
“The car, I think we made some nice improvements, but it was also, I think, straight away when we arrived here in, let’s say, a decent window. And then, I think where we just struggle a little bit is always that final sector, where we just don’t seem to get our deployment like our competitors, and that makes it, of course, very tough to match.
“But, overall, I’m quite happy with how everything went. Every qualifying, from Q1 to Q2 to Q3, just nice progression.
"There were not really things that, I guess, I left on the table, just more like a few limitations within the car that we know we have, plus the deployment in the final sector where we just didn’t seem to maybe fully get it right. But that’s qualifying. The race is again very different.”
Could Verstappen actually have hoped for a better result, given he topped Q2 by 0.160s over Antonelli?
“I think I was also one of the only ones that used two sets, so it’s not really a fair comparison,” he nuanced.
