Max Verstappen believes he would have won the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix had it not been for Red Bull’s transmission problems.
A failure of the driveshaft in Q2 forced Max Verstappen to start from 15th place in Jeddah. He took advantage of the impressive rhythm of the Red Bull to finish second behind Sergio Perezsnatching the fastest lap point from the Mexican to retain the lead drivers championship barely. However, if Verstappen saved the furniture, he is still unhappy to have let slip a chance of victory.
“We have to do better collectively, we can’t have such problems”the Red Bull driver told Dutch media Viaplay. “Otherwise the race would have been very different for me. In the end we limited the breakage a bit, but I should have won here.”
Verstappen’s comeback was hampered by further concerns over the end-of-stroke driveshaft. The Dutchman initially attacked harder than the team wanted before giving up hopes of catching Pérez, focusing on the fastest lap point. His team-mate also expressed concerns, admitting that Red Bull’s performance advantage had prevented bigger reliability issues.
“We were in a lucky position in Bahrain, but if we had to push all the way we probably wouldn’t have finished the race”Pérez said. “So there are a lot of reliability concerns at the moment, but hopefully we won’t fall victim to that soon. There will be at some point, but we have to keep working on that.”
With Red Bull dominating the first two races of the season, it’s safe to assume that Verstappen and Pérez will be in contention for the world title, and the two-time champion called on Red Bull for impeccable reliability in this context: “QWhen you’re fighting for the title, and especially when it looks like it’s going to be between two cars, you have to make sure that both cars are reliable.”
