The brilliant maneuver of Max Verstappen was the big topic of conversation at the Formula 1 race in Imola last weekend. The world champion had put himself past Polesetter Oscar Piatri with a courageous attempt to overtake in the first curve of the race and thus laid the foundation for his victory in Italy.
Verstappen had received a lot of praise for the maneuver, but when he stepped in front of the microphones on Sunday, he hadn’t really seen his move – except from his own perspective.
At home, however, he looked at the scene that is decisive. “When I came home on Sunday, of course I already knew how it felt in the car, but I looked at it again,” he laughs. “It’s always nice to look back and see how tight everything was.”
“I had to grin in curve 3”
In the meantime, he knew why the maneuver was described as exceptional by many, but he also had the feeling in the car itself that he had succeeded in an important success: “I also had to smile a bit in the car when it worked,” he laughs. “In curve 3 I had to grin and thought: ‘Yes, that was a good thing!'”
Because actually the curve already seemed to belong to Piatri, while Verstappen himself was hazardous to land behind George Russell, but then the McLaren pilot braked surprisingly early. “In retrospect you can see that he really focused on George, especially because George was practically second at the time,” says Verstappen.
“I can understand that – he just didn’t expect me.”
And then it was too late for him to react, “because I took this swing from the brake zone. At that moment you can no longer react – I just had the swing.”
That says Piatri about overtaking maneuver
Piatri himself says that he could have prevented Vappens maneuvers with a simple trick: “I think just by braking later – that was a pretty simple analysis,” he says, after looking at the scene from the outside.
It is difficult for him to answer whether he would otherwise have won the race: “I think it would have been an interesting race anyway, no matter how curve 1 or curve 2 would have run,” he says. “I think Red Bull had at least as much pace on Sunday. I honestly don’t know whether they were faster or not.”
“But it also doesn’t particularly concern me because it was really very small differences. But Max would have been a danger either way, no matter what happened in the first half of the race.”