Max Verstappen was adamant he would step onto the podium despite starting in a lowly ninth place in Miami.
“I said to myself minimum P2 because I think that is where we should finish anyway with the car we have.
“But it’s always difficult to know, of course, what’s going to happen. “If you have a terrible lap one, you make it even harder for yourself.
“But luckily it didn’t work out too bad, just making sure you didn’t have any damage on the car but then again, it’s all about how the performance is of the car and how well you feel in the car, how much you can extract out of it.”
Verstappen stormed through the field on the hard tyre and found himself in third place after passing the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz after 14 laps.
The Dutchman decided to utilise the hard tyre in contrast to the majority of cars in the field who ran the softer medium tyre in the first stint.
The 25-year-old said his race engineer GianPiero Lambiase and himself had quite a strong opinion to start on hards. The strategy team would ultimately agree to it.
“This is something I wondered about already yesterday [Saturday], together with my engineer.
“We were quite strongly opinionated on that already (starting on hard) – then, of course, you have to discuss it with the team, with the strategists, they were like: ‘OK. In terms of race time, it was very close between doing a Medium/Hard or Hard/Medium.
“When you start on the Hard, the risk is a bit higher because we only had one, so if you had a lap one puncture or whatever, then of course your race is a bit tougher.”
Verstappen said he was happy to gamble in order to climb the order: “But I was happy to take that gamble and do it the other way around.
“Even if it was the other way around, of course you always have to look after your tyres, also on the Medium – but I just felt like maybe it gave me a better opportunity to get through the field initially.
“By lap 14, I was already on a podium position, so from there onwards it’s mostly about driving in clean air and you have to look after your tyres anyway.”
