Verstappen’s qualifying crash played the biggest role in his race strategy, so Red Bull put him on hard tires to elongate his first stint.

“At one point I was quite by myself, just settling in. I think the two hard compounds today didn’t really work for us so a lot of degradation, a lot of graining, and that made me then of course do a two-stop.” he commented his strategy, as quoted by an official F1 website.

As he finished with 54.617 seconds gap to race winner George Russell, he was asked whether he is worried about gap this big.

“I can be concerned about it but it’s not going to change anything, right? I’m not concerned about it.” he answered and added that they just have to work as a team to try and close the gap step by step and hopefully be more competitive.

Due to his track position, he had plenty of time to learn about the car and how the batteries work as he had to pass those in front.

“Of course, we have quite a bit more pace than the midfield, so I just needed to clear that cleanly, which I did.” he said.

Verstappen added that overall, his race felt okay. He became Red Bull’s only points finisher, because his teammate Isack Hadjar, who qualified third, had to retire from the race due to technical problem on his car.