Verstappen: I had to let Carlos make a mistake

Max Verstappen won the Italian Grand Prix, his tenth win in a row and a new record in Formula 1 history…

Max Verstappen (1st): “I could never believe this is possible, but today I had to work hard to achieve this – but it was even more fun!

We had a good pace, but the Ferrari car is very fast on the straights, so getting close and overtaking it in Turn 1 was not easy. We had to let Carlos Sainz make a mistake.

Fortunately, it happened at some point – he locked up the brakes, and then, of course, I managed to accelerate better than him out of the second corner, after which we just controlled the course of the race.

I tried to be patient because I realized there was a long race ahead of me and I saw that Ferrari had big problems with the rear tyres. In general, you just had to wait for the right moment.

Our car worked well, although there were some problems towards the end, but luckily I had a big advantage so I could afford to slow down a bit.”

Sergio Perez (2nd): “Second place is the maximum that could be achieved, because it was very difficult to overtake – more difficult than we expected. In my opinion we missed a bit of maximum speed on the straights. Sometimes I could accelerate nicely from the Parabolica, but it was still not enough and most of the time I was two to three tenths behind.

Reducing the distance to the opponent’s car to two tenths gave some opportunities, but at three tenths I couldn’t get close to the attack distance.

I was able to get ahead of Charles and Carlos, but it was a completely insane fight because I had to use up a lot of the tire resources. At the start of the race I even thought I wouldn’t be able to overtake them, I tried to put pressure on Charles but he was able to use DRS, because he was behind Carlos, so the fight was very intense, but in the end we managed to be ahead of both.

I think we’ve made a lot of progress thanks to working with the settings properly and I’m much more comfortable behind the wheel now. I expect that we will be at the peak of form for the next few races.”