03/08/2025
NEWS STORY
Max Verstappen: "Unfortunately, the whole weekend wasn't good for us and we need to understand why that was.
"It has been quite tough as we got stuck in between cars during the race and struggled for grip. Although the high speed was okay, the low and medium speed wasn't good. There are a lot of things to understand as the car has been difficult all weekend and we couldn't turn things around unfortunately. Like we always do, we will analyse everything and take learnings from the weekend to find more performance as we go into Zandvoort. Ultimately, this weekend hasn't gone to our liking, but it is now summer break and I can enjoy time with family and friends and not think too much about the racing side of things. There are many more races left and we can look to do better after the break. We want to aim to be more consistent and always try and even though it was a disappointing result we will keep our head up."
Yuki Tsunoda: "This weekend has been a tough one for the Team. We knew coming into today that it would be tricky to move up into the points, and once I had damage to the front wing our race was effectively over. The gurney flap fell off halfway through and that cost us a lot of pace and worsening grip, so we then lost the ability to make a positive strategy call that would benefit us. Looking back on the season so far I can feel pretty positive, we've made progress, especially since the new floor upgrades were brought to Spa. The gap with Max continues to close, it may not feel like we are getting there but on paper we are only 1/10th off his pace, I'm not sure many other drivers could get as close to him. I am heading straight to the factory tomorrow to go into the Sim, we need to investigate where we went wrong and put in some hard work over the summer break so that we don't start the next half of the season how we finished this one. It's frustrating but we will stay positive and bounce back stronger."
Laurent Mekies: The Team have tried everything, but the underlying performance was missing to be able to fight at the top end, we will spend time reflecting during the break.
"It has been a very tough weekend from the first lap in FP1 and the race reflected this. We have certainly missed something quite key this weekend and looked at many things with both Yuki and Max, to try to get back to the level we had and get the car in the right window. The Team have tried everything, but the underlying performance was missing to be able to fight at the top end. The truth is we didn't have the performance so when we pitted Max wasn't ultimately going to be defining to the race result, we just did not have the lap time we needed in the car. Yuki was in a similar situation and starting from the pitlane meant he was never able to really make an impact on the field. What is important this weekend is that we have collected enough data to get out of similar situations in the future and make a positive step forward. These weekends are the ones you learn a lot from and that is what we will do. We will spend time reflecting during the break and we don't underestimate the work ahead of us, we have many, many talented people in the Team to overcome this and we want to come back with a different level of performance after the summer break."
Check out our Sunday gallery from the Hungaroring here.