Two weeks on from his miserable race in China and the furore around Verstappen’s driving has died down a bit. Given time to reflect on how things went for him last time out, he’s admitted he tried too hard to win the race:
“I’m not there to finish fifth with the car I had at that time. I mean, maybe I wanted it too much, the victory. To just slow yourself down, not do anything and drive around, I’m not like that, I’m not here to fill up the field. I just want to be myself, you learn from it but that doesn’t mean you have to drive slower, it actually means you have to drive faster but with a little bit in control. That’s what I learned.
One surprise voice of criticism came from Max’s father Jos, normally a staunch defender of his son’s actions. But Max wasn’t too worried about being told off by his dad because he welcomes the advice.
“My dad is the hardest critic of everyone in the whole world, so if I can handle him I can handle anyone. You’re not perfect, nobody is perfect, you can always improve. I am very happy to listen and also improve. At the end of the day, I have to look at myself because I could speak to a lot of people but it has to come from me. So I have to understand myself. But I’ve always been good at that and realising what went wrong. I’ve always been able to look at the positives from it.”
Overall it’s good to see Verstappen continuing to take such a mature approach to solve the problems he seems to have developed this season. He can talk about it all he wants, though – the real test will be in the coming races. Then we’ll see if he’s actually learning from his mistakes…
Edit: things aren’t going well so far – he’s already crashed in FP1…
