Explaining that he felt like he was "driving on ice", Max Verstappen admits that he didn't think his tyres were going to do the distance.

It was definitely a race of two halves, for while much of the afternoon at Imola was one long DRS train, a number of drivers began to suffer in the closing stages of the race after pushing their tyres too hard at the start of their second stint.

Among these was the world champion, who suddenly found himself under increasing pressure from Lando Norris who had done a much better job of maintaining his tyres.

"I'm not sure I can bring this to the end," Verstappen subsequently admitted to thinking just 10 laps into his stint on the hards. "You know, because the tyres just fell out of the operating window... it was just like driving on ice, really snappy, and just you can feel when the tyres are not gripping up anymore.

"Like Turn 7, I almost ended up in the grandstand, from my feeling, at some point," he continued. "So yeah, it's just very difficult, really weird lines that I had to take.

"Those last ten laps, you know, I was really trying to survive with the tyres, and then suddenly Lando really picked up the pace. I was not sure if I could keep him behind, but I was just trying to do the best I could, pushing as hard as I could with the grip that I had, and yeah, luckily it was just enough laps.

"It was like half a second a lap, I was like, that's a lot," said Verstappen of his pursuer. "But at the other end, you can't do anything about it, so I was just trying to do my pace. You cannot suddenly try and force a half a second out of it when you don't have the balance. So I was just trying to, yeah, really not make mistakes, really try to drive around the balance issues that I had and be quick on the straight.

"That's basically what I think helped me a bit at the end, but, also, with the rear wing that we had, you know, we're quite fast on the straight. That probably helped a bit in the last few laps to defend."

"Well, you know, Stefano's been asking us for weeks to try and make it closer at the end!" joked Christian Horner at race end. "But in all seriousness, on the first stint on the medium, it felt like we'd got everything under control.

"Max was able to build up, I think, up to an eight-second gap around the pit stop and the car was performing very, very well, particularly some of the areas we'd been weak on Friday in sector two, you know, he was very much setting the pace.

"After we changed onto the hard tyre, the first half of the stint was absolutely fine," he continued. "But as the gauge wears down on the tyre, temperature becomes crucial, and we just started to lose temperature in the tyre, and with that, the performance started to... we didn't get as much out of the tyre as Lando, who at one point looked like he was very much under pressure from Leclerc, and then he started to come hard at the end of the race.

"The other thing that made it particularly stressful in the last stage of the race was that Max had already had three strikes on track limits," he admitted. "So we couldn't afford, or Max couldn't afford to make a single mistake on the limits.

"But he delivered brilliantly, so despite significant pressure, he was able to manage it and keep Lando just out of the DRS."

Norris has said that with two more laps he could have probably beaten the Red Bull driver.

"We'd have been vulnerable on fuel," admitted Horner. "So, you know, it worked out. I think probably with hindsight, we would have been better running a hard on Friday, just because we had opted to take two new hard tyres into the race, and maybe it would have been better to have got the information on the tyre.

"But when you look at the turnaround that we had from Friday into Saturday to get the pole, and then to get the victory again today, it's been a phenomenal performance.

"Also Max has been incredible this weekend, and again, he's had to work very hard for both the pole position and the victory."

Check out our Sunday gallery from Imola here.