Christian Horner put his index finger on the paper in front of him. To a layman it would look like a spider’s web, given the tangle of lines that crisscrossed in all directions, but Red Bull’s British team boss extracted just the bit of evidence he needed to emphasize that Max Verstappen won the Grand Prix of Miami really should have won. After the world champion had hit a post in the early stages of the race, he had become slower, according to Horner. He had clearly suffered damage.
In other words: no one needs to draw premature conclusions from the fact that Lando Norris turned out to be a lot faster than Verstappen after the safety car was deployed. No one should hope that the Red Bull hegemony can be broken. A little later, however, Verstappen himself made short work of Horner’s conclusion: “I felt no difference with how the car was before I hit that pole, I think I was driving the same pace after it happened.”
So the question that Horner tried to tackle in advance was really a justified one. Can Red Bull’s competition hope for more? Has Norris shown that Verstappen can be beaten with his victory in Miami, his first F1 victory?
More ammo
Mercedes driver George Russell was in two minds when answering that question. “The McLarens qualified seventeenth and eighteenth here in Miami a year ago,” he recalled sharply. “Now they win the race. That shows what is possible when you get things in order.” It was mainly because of the knowledge that they did not have it in order at Mercedes that he did not become more hopeful about this weekend’s result. “We are not doing it well and need to make changes quickly.”
The team of Russell and Lewis Hamilton is currently clearly the fourth in Formula 1. McLaren and Ferrari have much more reason to be hopeful. Charles Leclerc even dared to speculate before the race about beating Verstappen and had gathered even more ammunition for this afterwards, even though he was unable to overtake the world champion around the Hard Rock Stadium.
Upgrades
“If we compare ourselves to Max this weekend it was positive,” he said of the small difference between the world champion and him during essentially the entire race weekend. “But Lando was extremely fast. Still, this weekend encourages me. I’ve often said that this season will also be determined by how good the upgrades are that the teams come up with. McLaren’s is clearly very good and ours is coming soon too. How much better we become will determine the course of our season. Hopefully it will turn out as well as it did with McLaren.”
Lando Norris himself said his victory only made him hungrier. “At the start of this season I felt more confident than ever that I have what it takes to win a grand prix. I already felt this weekend that I had the speed and that I could compete until the end of the race. I could see Max driving in front of me, even when I was still in sixth place. And if you can see him driving, there is hope, because that doesn’t happen very often. But I’ve said before that we can win races. People have doubted that, but if everything goes well, it is possible, we saw that today.”
“If you can see Max driving, there is hope, because that doesn’t happen very often.”
Tags: competition hope defeats Max Verstappen People doubts
