F1 legend Villeneuve brutally honest verdict about Max Verstappen

04 September 2023 , 20:21

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F1 legend Villeneuve brutally honest verdict about Max Verstappen

Former F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve has defended Max Verstappen's success this season after the Red Bull star won his tenth race in succession.

The Dutchman set a new record for the most successive race wins at the Italian Grand Prix on Sunday, surging past Ferrari star Carlos Sainz early on to storm to victory. His dominance this season has left some concerned with the direction of the sport.

But Villeneuve, who famously beat Michael Schumacher to the world title in 1997, has rejected those concerns. That is despite Verstappen having won 27 of the 37 races run since the start of the 2022 season, setting him up to win his third successive world title.

While that is an unprecedented period of dominance, Villeneuve has moved to defend Verstappen from criticism. He insisted that Verstappen should not be stopped and hailed the Dutchman for his talent.

"Who cares if it's good for the sport? He's amazing. That's it. You should not stop that. He's managed to do it better than anybody else. He's managed to work with his engineer and his team to turn the car into a second skin," Villeneuve told RacingNews365.

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"When you have that, you just sit in the car and you don't even think. The car does whatever you want it to. That's why every year Sergio Perez, for two or three races, [believes] he can beat Max.

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Former world champion Jacques Villeneuve has defended Max Verstappen (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

"But then Max works and gets the car to do what he wants. Then he destroys Perez. And that makes a difference. I had that end of 1996 and 1997. I would jump in the car and think: 'I know the car can do this,' and it does it."

Verstappen leads the world championship by 145 points heading into the final eight races of the season. He last failed to win a race in May and admitted his feat on Sunday was something he did not believe he would achieve.

“I never would have believed [10 wins in a row] was possible, but we had to work for it today and that was definitely a lot more fun. We had good pace, we were good on the tyres, but [Ferrari] had a lot of top speed," he said.

“It was so hard to get close and make the move into Turn 1. I had to force [Sainz] into a mistake and luckily it came at some point where he locked up, and I had better traction out of Turn 2, which was good, so we could do my own race.

“I just tried to stay patient. It was still a very long race. I could see they were struggling a lot with the rear tyres, so I just had to pick my moment. Everything felt good. We had to nurse a little issue at the end, but luckily we had the gap behind, so we could easily back off.”

Jacob Leeks