Verstappen wins the Canadian GP

It was a really rewarding victory today, these kind of races are a lot of fun as you don’t know what is going to be thrown at you and I enjoyed racing today. With the weather so bad it was so easy to make a mistake; we had to be really focused as one tiny move off the racing line could result in us going off the track into the wall. The Team made all the right calls at the right time and remained really calm. If you look at the last few weekends that we have had in these conditions, we have typically always done well, so that gave me a lot of confidence going into today. We also got quite lucky with the safety car, sometimes it can work for you and sometimes against you but that is racing! Once we were on the slick tyres at the end, the car had pretty decent pace and we managed to keep it going until the end. It was a tough weekend but I am really proud to bring home my 60th win.

It was a good weekend from the start, considering all conditions, and with a crazy race like that, I’m happy to finish it with some points in the bag. I got a penalty for a jump start, but I was a bit confused because I knew that I didn’t jump the lights but then I remembered that during the start I felt that maybe the car was moving. We had a bit of an issue with the car, and we’ll have a look at it, but obviously, this was a backstep for our race. When we pitted for the Inters, we lost a few positions to the cars that stayed out and weren’t really able to get much more out of the new tyres. We jumped out of the point-scoring positions, and the race was kind of getting away from us, but as the track dried towards the end and we were on mediums, I was able to pick my way through a few cars back into the top 10 which was a little bit of a relief. I’m happy it was a fairly smooth weekend for us, and obviously for increasing the gap to the midfield behind us.

Today was my mistake, a stupid move, and I’m sorry to the team. They definitely made the right decision about strategy and did a good job; it wasn’t easy on the old Inters but I was feeling okay. Also, the call when to change to dry tyres was good. At least I turned it around from Free Practice to qualifying and that’s good, but today’s disappointing and not the way I should’ve finished the race. It was just about bringing it home.

I have lost a lot of momentum recently and I will be working hard in the next couple of weeks to get back to form. I picked up some damage to my front wing on the first lap when Gasly and I touched, which compromised my first stint and lost us some momentum. There was only one dry line for most of the race and it was so difficult to pass at times. Later the dry line started to open up and as it did my inters were a little bit too used, then when I went onto the new inter and changed front wing I had good pace but it was still tricky to get by. The incident was on me, I touched the wet part into turn six and I couldn’t stop the car, I couldn’t touch the brakes. It has been a very tough couple of weekends, we will regroup, keep our heads down and learn from the weekend. We identified a couple of issues after qualifying and they meant we would have qualified a lot higher. Hopefully we can be back to our form in Spain and get back to the level we were at earlier in the season. I am confident in that, there are good tracks coming for us.