McLaren is back challenging for grand prix victories and the Miami winner is very much looking forward to feeling the energy of his home crowd…
WORDS ROBERT HOLMES PORTRAIT MOTORSPORT IMAGES
McLaren has generally not been great in low-speed corners for the past few seasons. That seems to have shifted a little with the first upgrade package. Has that lifted confidence?
A bit. It’s still our biggest weakness. Even if you look to Imola, you look at Turn 7, that’s still our worst corner, the chicane, still one of our worst corners. But I don’t think we’re bad. When we’re saying it’s our biggest weakness, we’re talking about maybe half a tenth at times and that kind of thing.
Max Verstappen says he sees you and McLaren as championship rivals this season. Toto Wolff and Christian Horner seem to agree. Is that how you see yourself?
It’s a long, long way to go. I’m definitely not thinking of it and it really doesn’t change anything. We’ve not thought about it at all. You concentrate on getting a good result and things just play out. We’ve definitely put ourselves in there. We lost a lot over the first couple of [race] weekends, so that’s hurt us, but there’s still plenty of opportunities for us. And we know we still have some things coming in the future.
If things turn around, then we can easily start to come back at some of the teams. Especially because I think we’re probably the team, along with Ferrari at least, where we have two cars up there performing at every session – every single race and qualifying. If you look at a lot of the grid they don’t really have that. You have one guy who’s put in a mega lap and then has a good race and the other one not so much. I think one of our strengths is we’ve always had two cars up there and we can fight well along with Ferrari at the minute. So if we keep doing that then for sure we can stay in it.
Having reviewed the Imola data, was there anything you could have done differently to be closer to Max a couple of laps earlier?
I think we had a pretty optimal race. I clearly had the best race pace in the second stint by a considerable margin. At the same time, if I’d pushed more, I would have ended up like Max. So it’s impossible, it’s something you can’t define. There isn’t a yes or no answer. You win in one part, you’re going to lose in another part. So I think we gave it our all. I didn’t make any silly mistakes that cost me one second or something like that. I never we
