Max Verstappen says Red Bull need to bring more improvements to their car in order to challenge McLaren at the majority of grand prix venues.
Following a series of poor races, Red Bull made clear progress with their car in Singapore. At the track where they endured by far their worst performance of 2023, Verstappen was second only to Lando Norris in qualifying.
Although Verstappen acknowledged that street tracks are likely to remain the RB20’s weakness, he says they still need to find more to challenge McLaren at more conventional circuits.
“We still need to figure out the base pace, the long run pace a bit more,” he told the official F1 channel. “We know that, of course, this track is not ideal for us, but I think even on a normal track at this stage, we still can’t fight them so we need to bring more performance.”
Verstappen fell up to half a minute behind Norris at one stage, but finished the race 20 seconds behind the McLaren. He said it became clear soon after the start he didn’t have the pace to challenge Norris.
“Quite quickly I realised that it was not possible to follow and I just tried to do my own race and just keep my momentum going, even though, of course, it was not the same pace as Lando,” he said.
“The first stint was a bit difficult. I had a lot of rear deg[radation], a lot of sliding. That’s just cost me a lot of lap time.
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“Then the second set was a little bit more competitive. It’s still not of course where we want to be, but I think overall it was a bit more promising.”
He said the scale of his deficit to Norris “wasn’t really a surprise because the balance that I had at one point in that person was not really nice – I was losing a lot of lap time just on myself.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said they had made clear gains with their car after their struggles since the summer break.
“If you consider where we were a few weeks ago the progress is visible, and we have the better part of a month to put our heads down and make some progress before we head to Austin,” he said. “There will be a lot of late nights in Milton Keynes.”
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2024 Singapore Grand Prix
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