Hamilton poised to end F1 win drought as Verstappen makes Red Bull admission

22 October 2023 , 22:06

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Max Verstappen speaks after winning the United States Grand Prix (Image: Sky Sports)

Max Verstappen admitted he could easily have been beaten by Lewis Hamilton at the United States Grand Prix.

And Christian Horner conceded that the gap between Red Bull and their rivals is closer than ever in this season. It will raise hopes among the likes of Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari that they can win races between now and the end of the year.

Red Bull have, of course, already won both titles in 2023. And they have not been developing their RB19 cars for many weeks now with attention turned fully to their new machine for next year.

That has opened the door for their rivals. Verstappen won the race from sixth on the grid, but did so by only two seconds over Hamilton. If the race was a couple of laps longer, the charging Brit would most likely have got the better of his rival.

Team principal Horner said it was a side-effect of the development race in these late weeks of the season. "We started sixth and ninth and so we knew it was going to be very tough to win the race today," he said.

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"We haven't developed the car at all really since the summer break and you can see others are bringing performance and the gap is converging, which just shows in Formula 1, if you're standing still you're going backwards. Of course, all of our focus is on next year's car."

And Verstappen admitted that Hamilton might have beaten him had Mercedes been a little more proactive with their pit decisions. "I don't think we were dominant – we only won by two seconds," said the champion.

"For sure, they could have won today if they had a better strategy after the first stop. The whole weekend they were very good, quick and today, from our side, the brake issues were hampering me a little bit for my pace. But in general they were very strong this weekend."

Verstappen was also dealing with an issue in his car which hampered his pace. He added: "We changed the brakes after yesterday and it was not good. I had no good feeling under braking and I couldn't get on top of it for the whole race.

"This is something we need to understand because around here when you're not very confident on the brakes, you just don't have the nice feeling, it can cost you quite a bit of lap time. It was a bit more difficult than I expected it to be. In general, I normally never really struggle with braking, so far in my F1 career, but today it definitely was a bit of a problem."

Daniel Moxon