Max about Imola: 'It will not be easy to set-up the car'

Published on 27 October 2020 by Niels Hendrix

Max Verstappen took a well-deserved podium in Portimao. How does it feel to achieve your 40th career podium, Max? “I don’t really pay much attention to the numbers and of course it is nice to be adding more podiums but we are all here to win so we need to keep working and trying to become even better as a team. Our goal as Red Bull always has to be getting on the top step.”

Formula 1 has not raced at Imola since 2006, what sort of challenges do you think we will face? Max says: “I don’t think it’s going to be easy to set-up the car because we only have one practice session which could make it interesting, especially for the engineers! I don’t expect the anti-clockwise track to be a problem, even though there aren’t many on the calendar, but this track is quite narrow and there are a lot of kerbs you have to take. It’s going to be important to find a good compromise between top speed on the long straight and also having decent cornering to hit the kerbs well.”

The track is narrow and renowned for being difficult to overtake on but you went from 11th to 2nd in an F3 race, what do you expect in an F1 car? Max answers: “I’m really looking forward to racing there in an F1 car, the last time for F1 was in 2006 and I think the circuit has changed a little bit since then. I raced there in Formula 3 and really enjoyed it, especially coming through the field in the race. You need a decent amount of top speed as well as a good set-up but there are some overtaking opportunities. Of course F1 cars are harder to follow than F3 cars so overtaking won’t be easy but we’ll have to wait and see what is possible. If we can get qualifying right then hopefully we won’t need to overtake too much. Overall I think it’s going to be a really cool addition to the calendar.”