Another strong weekend for Max Verstappen, who finished second at the Marina Bay Circuit behind George Russell. Despite consistently finishing ahead of the two McLaren drivers in recent races, these results might not be enough to keep his championship hopes alive. The Dutch driver currently sits third in the standings, 63 points behind leader Oscar Piastri and 41 points adrift of Lando Norris.
Singapore: car issues forced Max to ‘make do’
After the Singapore Grand Prix, the “lion” stated: “To reach that [the drivers’ title, ed.], you need to dominate. That’s not what we’re doing, or at least not what we did in Singapore. We are not getting close enough. To do that, we should have won, and we didn’t manage it.”
“It’s how it goes; we lost too many points at the start of the season, that’s obvious,” he added. “But we’ll keep trying race by race, and we did the best we could. Singapore is not our favourite track, also for the car, but despite everything, second place is still a very good result.”
Max did not have an easy race due to gearbox issues that made it difficult to shift up or down: “It was really unpredictable, it made it very difficult to enter corners. Then even the car’s balance was worse than I expected, so I had to manage that too. It was really hard to stay consistent: it happens to me often, but this time it was terrible, I have no idea what went wrong.”
According to the four-time World Champion, McLaren still has the best race pace and therefore maintains an advantage. Another factor that “penalised” Verstappen was the start, as there was a clear difference in grip between the right and left sides of the track. For this reason, the Red Bull driver started the race on soft tyres but still couldn’t overtake George Russell.
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