Max Verstappen shrugged off losing out to Lewis Hamilton in Friday’s qualifying session at the British Grand Prix.
After dominating the only practice earlier in the day, the Red Bull driver found himself in a titanic battle with the crowd favourite at Silverstone, ultimately missing out by just 0.075s in Q3.
But despite seeing his run of three consecutive P1’s in qualifying ended, Verstappen was rather dismissive of it all, noting that pole position isn’t actually handed out until after the new 17-lap Sprint Qualifying race on Saturday.
“It’s a bit of a weird feeling, to be honest. You do qualifying, you go flat out and actually it doesn’t mean anything in terms of, you know, pole position feeling,” he said.
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“We will see tomorrow. I think we have a strong race car, we just need to fix a bit the issues we had in qualifying. I am quite confident still that we can have a strong race.”
After Verstappen’s dominance in Austria, Silverstone was always expected to be a tougher task against Mercedes, who have also brought upgrades to their car for this weekend.
However, the championship leader believes the only reason he wasn’t fastest was due to Red Bull.
“We just need to look at ourselves because I think the car itself was actually handling quite well but just a lot of understeer so I couldn’t really attack any corners, just waiting for the front to grip up,” he explained.
“[It was] a bit of a weird feeling to be honest to drive because I don’t think it was setup or front wing related, but it is what it is. We are still quite close, so it’s alright.”
Given his 32-point lead in the championship over Hamilton, Max is still guaranteed to be ahead leaving Silverstone whatever the outcome over the next two days.