Max Verstappen wins the Sao Paulo Grand Prix for the 17th time this season

It has been a good weekend in Brazil. It was a great race and we had good all-round pace throughout. Again, it was a really long stint on the tyres and it was important to save them throughout as we had high tyre degradation. Lando had a good race and I had to work to defend in the first lap and maintain the gap. He was close to me in stint one and pushed a bit harder on the newer compounds at the start but I stayed calm throughout the race, just relaxed and let the car roll into the corner. He did well  and we had some good racing today. It has been quite a long triple header so looking forward to a few days break before preparing for Vegas. I am enjoying the moment and hopefully we can continue this success until the end of the year. 

Let’s start from the beginning, it took me a while to get through the Mercedes and that damaged my race, after that we were always a bit on the back foot with Fernando. We were chipping away at him and towards the end we came really close to the podium. I have to say well done to Fernando because it was a great fight and really fair racing. Between us, whoever got the podium, it was well deserved, and he got it. I had the opportunity and went for it but he was really fast on the straights and I don’t think I could have done anything differently in the final few laps. I think that pace has been there for the last few weekends, but we haven’t been able to put it all together, it was a matter of time before it came. It was a good weekend for us in Championship, because we are getting closer to securing second spot, now we go to Vegas. 

Good job to the team! I’m happy for scoring points, but I definitely could’ve done more. I made a mistake in Turn 10, which caused me to lose one position, so I’m really sorry to the team. I think more was possible, especially as we were managing some reliability issues that we’ll look into. It’s such a shame about Daniel as well because he was also really fast. I think we both could’ve scored points today. Looking at the positive, starting P16 and ending up P9 shows the strong pace of the car and that we’ve definitely made a big step in the last races since we introduced the upgrades in Austin. We’re in a good rhythm now, scoring consecutive points in three weeks, and it’s important to keep that momentum for the last two races of the season. We’ll keep extracting performance from the car and aim to continue scoring points, to close the gap to Williams who are ahead of us in the Constructors’ Championship. 

It was a messy race start. I saw quite a big crash in front of me, and there was a lot of debris. I felt like I was getting through it, but at a certain point, I saw a tyre flying in the air, like a frisbee, which was starting to get closer. I checked my mirrors and saw the tyre had hit and damaged my rear wing. Due to the red flag, we returned to the pits, where the team did a great job in repairing the car to be ready to restart the race. Unfortunately, I was told that Oscar (Piastri) and I would be a lap down and had to restart from the pitlane. All the frustration was because we were really fast today. We stayed behind Yuki, helping him score points, but when we had clear air, I felt like the pace I showed was very strong. I think we made some good progress throughout this weekend, and I’m happy with that seeing as it's a track that has never been a strong one for me. I believe I could've contributed quite a lot to the team in scoring points today if only we didn't restart the race one lap down. I'm now looking forward to Las Vegas.