{"id":406945,"date":"2025-09-08T04:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T04:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/406945\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T04:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T04:33:10","slug":"max-verstappen-says-red-bull-has-taken-another-step-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/406945\/","title":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen says Red Bull has taken another step forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Max Verstappen reckoned his once-dominant Red Bull team had taken another step towards getting back to its form of old with victory at Monza on Sunday.<\/p>\n

Even if a fifth successive Formula One title now looks well out of his reach, the Dutch driver won the Italian Grand Prix by more than 19 seconds — qualifying with the sport\u2019s fastest ever lap and following up with the fastest race in history. <\/p>\n

The victory ended a run of eight races without a win and followed on from second place at home in Zandvoort the weekend before, leaving Verstappen 94 points adrift of McLaren\u2019s championship leader Oscar Piastri with eight rounds remaining. <\/p>\n

With three Saturday sprints also still to come, there are a maximum of 224 points still to be won. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt just seems like this weekend has been another step forward with the behaviour of the car and that also then shows in the race,\u201d Verstappen told reporters. <\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, McLaren stayed out to try and gamble for the safety car, and I think that\u2019s why the gap is a little bit bigger than it should have been. But still for us, an incredible weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n

ALSO READ | Max Verstappen claims dominant victory at Italian Grand Prix<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

Verstappen said some previous races had made him feel like a passenger in the car but now there was more balance and the tyres were behaving more normally, although some of it was track-dependent. <\/p>\n

\u201cUp until now we\u2019ve had a lot of races where we were just shooting left and right a little bit with the set-up of the car. Quite extreme changes, which shows that we were not in control,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe were not fully understanding what to do.\u201d <\/p>\n

Verstappen said the arrival of Laurent Mekies, who comes from an engineering background, as team principal after Christian Horner was dismissed in July had helped. <\/p>\n

The win was the team\u2019s first of the post-Horner era. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s asking the right questions to the engineers — common-sense questions — so I think that works really well,\u201d he explained. <\/p>\n

\u201cPlus, you try to understand from the things that you have tried, that at one point some things give you a bit of an idea of a direction, and that\u2019s what we kept on working on. <\/p>\n

\u201cI definitely felt that in Zandvoort already we took a step that seemed to work quite well, and then here another step which felt again a little bit better.\u201d <\/p>\n

Verstappen won nine races last year, after a record 19 of 22 in 2023, but Sunday was only his third of a current campaign in which McLaren have so far won 12.<\/p>\n

Published on Sep 08, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen reckoned his once-dominant Red Bull team had taken another step towards getting back to its form…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4199,707,4200,1073,140209,140212,140210,140211,140208,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-406945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-max-verstappen","12":"tag-max-verstappen-f1","13":"tag-max-verstappen-formula-1","14":"tag-max-verstappen-italian-grand-prix","15":"tag-max-verstappen-on-red-bull","16":"tag-max-verstappen-red-bull","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115166812814453164","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}