18/09/2023
NEWS STORY
On a day that "everything went against him", Max Verstappen vows to come back stronger.
While there has always been doubt regarding the accuracy of articles on Wikipedia, ahead of Sunday's race few would have believed the latest addition to the website in terms of Max Verstappen's record run of ten successive victories.
The Dutchman had qualified eleventh and his teammate thirteenth, and even then there was controversy over the stewards' decision not to penalise him for the impeding incident involving Yuki Tsunoda.
Come race end, the Dutchman had worked his way up to fifth, just 0.264s down on the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc.
While we continue to ponder why Red Bull was so out of salts this weekend, many citing the technical directive from the FIA, in true 'Arnie-style', Verstappen and his team vow that they'll be back.
"I knew that this day would come, so for me it's absolutely fine," The Dutchman told reporters at race end. "To keep winning everything needs to be perfect.
"Everyone is always saying, 'Oh, look at how dominant they are, look how easy it is'," he continued. "But it's not easy. It's a lot of details that you always need to get right, and clearly this weekend we didn't get a few things right.
"I think everything went against us in the race with the Safety Car," he added. "It was possibly the worst-case scenario. With the strategy today it was really important to not make any mistakes, otherwise you're on the back foot and you don't win.
"I really think that if the safety cars had worked out a little bit more in our favour, I would actually be fighting with the guys at the front because that last stint was quite decent, I was able to have some fun catching up on the mediums. But still, we were unlucky during the race with all the safety cars going against us.
"I think we did the best we could. We had good pace and we were just unfortunate with the timing of the safety car. If it weren't for that, I really think that we would have been in a good place to fight up front.
"Clearly we learnt quite a bit from today and maybe what we did wrong yesterday," he added.
Asked if the team knows why it has struggled so badly all weekend, he replied: "I cannot go into details. The problem is we can only show next year, when we come back, if it's better or not.
Asked if the car had improved overnight ahead of the race, he said: "Normally our car is always better in the race and I think you could see that again today in the race, especially on the medium at the end I think we had good pace."
"We were very unlucky," insisted Christian Horner. "The safety car could not have come at a worse time and that killed any chance for us to get into contention. It was a shame. But there are also a lot of positives."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Marina Bay here.