Max Verstappen finished a close second at the 2024 British GP, just over a second back from race winner Lewis Hamilton. But it wasn’t always looking that competitive for the Dutchman, who at points fell a long way back from the leading contenders at the early stages, as he struggled for grip in his RB20 in the greasy conditions around Silverstone.
Speaking after the race, the three-time world champion reflected on his difficult first stint to the race, in which after a great start saw him challenging Lewis Hamilton for P2 on the opening lap, he fell back behind both McLaren cars and was running a distant P5 – and even being pressured by Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari as the rain started to fall – putting it down to struggles with tyre degradation and a general lack of race pace in his Red Bull:
“Yeah, the beginning was not very good,” said Verstappen. “I mean, I tried to keep up, but I just ran out of tires. I mean, everything was running hot and just struggled for grip. So then Lando [Norris] got by, then Oscar [Piastri] got by, started to rain.
“I had no grip as well there. I didn’t want to take too much risk as well because it just didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel comfortable.
“So I just, yeah, I was like, I’ll just sit here and try to survive. And yeah, that’s what I did. Then at one point even Carlos [Sainz] rocked up at the party, so I was like ‘Jesus, really bad afternoon’.
“But then, yeah, we just kept it on track, made the right calls from the slick to the inter and then from the inter back to the slick tire, which just basically kept me in contention, really. I mean, by making the right calls today, we were there at the right time.”
After comfortably winning the British GP in 2023, Verstappen couldn’t set race-winning pace at Silverstone this season until very late on in the grand prix, when his car was fitted with the C1 hard tyres, as the RB20 struggled with degradation on the softer compounds:
“And to the end with the hard tire, that was the right call for us, definitely. So we could push on the tire because of the medium already wasn’t good enough for us. So to the end to go flat out on the hard was the best we could do.
“And we finished second. So at one point it was looking like P5 or P6 even. So yeah, on a poor afternoon, I would say, in terms of performance to be second, I take that.
“I just didn’t have the pace. I couldn’t follow what they were doing in front of me. And that’s something, of course, that we need to look at.”
When asked to expand on Red Bull’s lack of pace in the race, Verstappen explained it’s a high-fuel issue, as the pace in qualifying – which was also severely hampered by a damaged underfloor – was still very tight at the front:
“Well, over one lap, it didn’t look too bad. I think it was just pace in the race. We just didn’t have the pace.
“I couldn’t follow the [tyre] deg of the others and that’s something, of course, that we need to understand.”
But despite the overall performance lacking somewhat, the driver and team made the difference in securing second place in a race that had many pivotal points of switch between the inters and slick tyres, which Verstappen described as sometimes being “a gamble” that paid off in the end to secure a podium out of what had proved to be a difficult weekend:
“It’s a constant discussion that I have with GP [Gianpiero Lambiase, Verstappen’s race engineer], with the radar. He tells me the information he has as well as he can.
“And then as a driver, of course, at one point if you don’t feel like you can continue on a slick or you think now it’s time to go to the inter, you have to shout over the radio that you’re coming in. So that’s what we did. And then it’s the same from inter to slick.
“Of course, the team can sometimes help you a little bit more with that if someone is on a slick already. But at the end of the day, the sun was coming out, the track was still drying up quite quickly, [we knew from] the last few days even.
“And took a bit of risk, not being 100% sure this is the right lap, but we went for it and it was the right lap at the end of the day.”
