Max Verstappen: “We should start communicating using sign language. It would be cheaper. It’s a disaster, very frustrating”
Max Verstappen came from sweeping Sepang and Singaporewith a car that from Baku took a huge leap in performance that allowed it to bring out its best version. and in austinarrived as the main favorite. However, Kimi Antonelli He surpassed him in qualifying and in the race, the Italian was far superior. Verstappen faced the perfect storm.
Everything went wrong. And one of the things that didn’t work was the radio, something that has already happened in other races this year. Therefore, Max did not hide his frustration after the appointment due to this repeated setback.
“The second time? It’s not the second time. It’s happened I don’t know how many times this year. Maybe we should start communicating through sign language. It would probably be cheaper too. It’s a disaster. Yes, it’s a disaster. The truth is that it is very frustrating,” commented the four-time F1 champion at the podium men’s press conference after the F1 United States GP in Austin.
Aside from how important the radio is in the race, it was also key this weekend since He was not accompanied by his usual track engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, because ‘GP’ will leave for McLaren in 2028and for this reason, the Red Bull team is beginning to prepare its replacement with this type of tests.
Your replacement will be Tom Hartwhich debuted in this role as part of that learning and transition process as Max’s track engineer in Austin. And on this first occasion, Hart could not communicate properly with a Max who could hardly be understood when he opened the radio.
These problems, as Max says, have already occurred more times. It is surprising that something similar happened to him in the previous race, in Singapore. On that occasion, Verstappen said that GP was able to deal with this problem wonderfully by giving him the information he needed at all times without him being able to demand it.: “GP and I understand each other so well that, even without a radio, many times he already knew what I was going to ask him and would answer me before I could do it.”
In Austin everything went wrong
In Austin many factors came together that prevented Max from shining. The first, that Kimi performed wonderfully, exceeding the expectations they had at Mercedes with a Mercedes in which they had to continue finding more performance in the latest parts they implemented in Sepang.
And for his part, everything went wrong. His start was bad with a Red Bull that has suffered a lot this year in the first meters. Leclerc put the car into the ‘es’ of Austin with the maximum energy button and that made Kimi escape by more than two seconds, something that made it impossible for Max to try to stop him. And furthermore, the tire strategy chosen by Mercedes was perfect and that of Red Bull, the opposite.
Mercedes read perfectly that the hard rubber, despite not having used it in a long run before, was the one that would perform best. And it worked. And to top it all off, Red Bull also made a slow stop to the pits.
Max Verstappen spoke about all this at the press conference after the F1 United States GP
I think that the strategy we followed and the tires we chose were not right either. So there are several things to analyze: why those tires did not perform as expected and why the others performed better than expected.
“We have not taken full advantage of our possibilities, far from it. The problems, of course, don’t help, but I think that the strategy we followed and the tires we chose were not the right ones either. So there are several things to analyze: why those tires did not perform as we expected and why the others performed better than expected,” Verstappen commented.
“In shortwe have things to learn. And a slow pit stop doesn’t help either. Those are seconds you throw overboard, right? And when you’re fighting a close battle for second place, it hurts your performance. Normally we are very good at this kind of thing, but today we were not”said Verstappen after finishing third, surpassed by a Leclerc with more pace with his Ferrari. He only had one stroke of luck: a virtual safety car at the end of the race that prevented Hamilton from taking third place from him. The rest, all things to improve for the next Grand Prix, which takes place this weekend in Mexico, and to which Max arrives in the middle of a fierce fight for the runner-up position.
