Max Verstappen wins Austrian Grand Prix for seventh time this season

It’s been a pretty incredible weekend; it couldn’t have been any better to be honest. We did everything well as a Team, from the strategy through to the pit stops. Heading into the race we all had question marks around the tyres but we were all happy with how they performed compared to our competitors. I felt really comfortable in the car all weekend and we were able to do everything that we had planned. The final pit stop was a risk of course, I think the Team could hear from my voice on the radio that I wanted to pit (laughs). From the outside it might have looked crazy but I knew we could do it, I saw there was a gap and I wanted to make the most of it.

It was a really good race. I think we had the pace this weekend: we showed it in the Sprint and we showed it today. It was a nice comeback and I feel really comfortable with the car, it has been really special. I think we were all racing quite hard and it is always a pleasure to battle with drivers like Carlos. We have had a tricky few races, so it has been nice to get back and have that pace and form. I am still not one hundred per cent physically, however, so now I need to look ahead and recover ahead in time for Silverstone.

I think it was a solid race today. We made some overnight changes to the car to find more performance, which meant we started the race from the pitlane. It certainly played out well for us as the early Virtual Safety Car closed the gap between all the cars. In terms of execution, I think we did a good job and extracted the maximum out of our package, we just lacked pace to fight further towards the top ten. I’ll take the penalty that the stewards gave me, we are just trying to find the limit, but thankfully we made a sufficient gap to not lose any positions. I still have a lot to improve on, and I’m certainly not yet at the level I want to be, but collectively, we are trying to consistently improve.

At the start, I was aggressive trying to make up as many positions as possible. It could’ve gone well, but unfortunately, we damaged the car going into turn one and went off-track at turn four. I don’t know if I sustained damage on the floor from this, but afterwards, I didn’t have pace, so it was a super difficult drive. I couldn’t keep the car within the track limits, and I can definitely learn from this in the future, but overall, it was just a challenging race.