The Monaco Grand Prix was a pivotal moment on Max Verstappen’s route to this year’s world championship, according to the driver and his ex-F1-driver father.
Verstappen finished third in the race, which was won by his team mate Sergio Perez. But Verstappen and father Jos have explained in a new documentary that from this point in the season Red Bull began improving the car in a way which allowed the champion to get the best from it.
“Where I see a turning point, also in the way Max was going, it was after Monaco,” said Jos Verstappen in Viaplay’s Lion Unleashed 2.
His son arrived in Monaco at the top of the championship standings with a six-point lead over Charles Leclerc, and Perez a further 19 behind.
“He had difficulties with the car, and the car wasn’t going well for his liking,” Verstappen’s father explained. “After Monaco we really pushed hard, together with the team, and I think they went in the right direction to solve that problem for him.”
The car was slowly developed “more in his way”, most of which was down to “set-up and weight” as Red Bull shed kilograms from a car that had begun the season over the minimum weight limit.
Verstappen said he was pleased with the changes made with the car after the Monaco race. “We had a good discussion after Monaco about what I needed from the car and what I wanted from the car,” the world champion explained.
“The beginning of the season, the car was not really of my liking, but that was also because of the weight of the car was in the wrong place as well.
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“So the more we were getting rid of the weight, the more the car was anyway becoming more competitive. And this is also the way I like the car to be. It was just slowly coming into my kind of driving style to go quick. So that definitely helped me a lot afterwards.”
Red Bull responded well to his requests, said Verstappen. “It was just saying like ‘guys, we have to be a little bit more focused on what we actually need from the car now, we need to really get rid of the weight, we know it’s really painful’ and I just said ‘I need a strong front end, and we have to work on that’.”
The weekend also appears to have been a flashpoint in the relationship between Verstappen and Perez. Later in the year Verstappen turned down a request to help his team mate, a move which was interpreted by some as being retaliation for Perez’s crash in the final stages of Q3 in Monaco,…
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