19/05/2024
NEWS STORY
Max Verstappen: "It was a close race today. I didn't expect that the car would have that kind of pace at the beginning, which was nice and we were strong on the medium tyres.
"When we swapped to the hard tyres, it was a bit trickier to drive and more of a struggle to bring it to the end as tyres fell out of the operating window and we had really low grip. During the last ten laps I was really trying to survive on the tyres and managed to keep Lando behind, but it required a lot of focus as we were on the limit with the penalty. However, we managed to work through and take the win; I was definitely counting down the laps until the end and it was a great feeling when we took the chequered flag! If you look at where we were at the beginning of the weekend, this was an extremely good result. There is a bit of work to do and things to analyse but we are looking forward to Monaco."
Sergio Perez: "We knew it was going to be a hard day today as the whole weekend was compromised from qualifying. Imola is a difficult track to overtake on so this was the maximum we could do today, especially we were struggling with traffic in the beginning on my first stint and on the hard tyres we had no margin to play around with the balance. We knew that McLaren were the fastest but Max had one of the best weekends I've seen from him in awhile, so a lot of praise for that and this was a great result for us. We have a few things we need to analyse and certainly some work to do as we head into the next race, but I'm looking forward to Monaco and hopefully we will continue our strong season and get some good momentum back."
Christian Horner: "It was a race of two halves for us today. The first half was really strong and we built a good buffer, but the second half Lando started to catch us very quickly. Max couldn't afford to put a millimetre wrong with track limits and the pressure of Lando behind, so a great job by Max. It's very satisfying to win a race like that when you have been pushed so hard. After qualifying, we ran the reverse strategy for Checo and the result was probably the best we could've got in a straight race like we had with no safety cars. McLaren and Ferrari were very quick and it's going to be a really tight fight with both teams, especially as the cars are converging which is what naturally happens when you have stable rules. Overall, it was a weekend to remember in Imola and the whole team is looking forward to going again next weekend in Monte Carlo."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Imola here.