Max Verstappen admits the job of winning is still not done despite claiming pole for the Austrian Grand Prix.
With thousands of his ‘Orange Army’ watching on from the stands, the Red Bull driver secured a hattrick of poles in Formula 1’s first tripleheader, just beating McLaren’s Lando Norris by only 0.048s.
And in fact, while qualifying appeared to be serene for Verstappen, the Dutchman wasn’t very pleased post-session.
“Q3 was pretty bad,” he explained after berating his team over the radio on the in-lap. “I am not very… I am happy, of course, to be first but not in the way we got it so something to look into.”
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Later, it was revealed Max was unhappy at being left without a tow for his final run of the top 10 shootout.
“Just in Q3, the first lap, I locked up at Turn 3. It wasn’t amazing,” he said. “The second one I was the first car out so I just lost time on the straights so I couldn’t improve my lap, even with a more normal Turn 3.
“It was still good enough for first, but I would have liked to just have a better Q3.”
Looking forward to the race, it appears Verstappen has an easy run to victory with a McLaren and Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez behind him, but Max is remaining cautious.
“Twice on pole here is very good so hopefully, we can finish it off tomorrow,” he stated.
“We’ve softer [tyre] compounds compared to last week so it will be tough to manage those in the race but besides that just try to focus on our own race and we will try to win it but it is never straightforward.”
As for Perez, he produced another strong Saturday performance to claim third after appearing off the pace on Friday.
“Well, it has been a really hard weekend up to now,” the Mexican admitted. “We have been chasing the balance a lot and just exploring the car in those areas, just chipping away every single run.
“It didn’t come easy. It was very hard work, harder than you might think but in the end, we got a good lap and a good starting position for tomorrow because, in the end, I think tomorrow we have a better race car than in quali.”