Motor racing: F1 champion Verstappen hopes rivals can raise their game

NEW YORK - Red Bull’s Max Verstappen shrugged off a suggestion he was favourite for a third successive Formula One championship and said on Friday the sport needed a closer battle than last season, even if he intended to be better than ever.

He won 15 of 22 races in a campaign that was his team’s best yet, with Mexican teammate Sergio Perez adding two to the tally. Rivals and runners-up Ferrari won four races and once-dominant Mercedes, third overall, just one.

“As a driver, you always try to look at yourself, what can you do better, and you try to come back stronger every single year even though sometimes that’s a hard task,” the Dutchman said at the team’s livery launch in New York on Friday.

Asked how keen he was for Mercedes to get back into the fight, with seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton failing to win a race in a season for the first time in his career, Verstappen replied: “In the interests of the sport, you always want the teams to be super close. But I do think it was already quite close last year.

“As a team, we also really executed a lot of things better than the other teams and that’s why I guess the points gap was also so big.

“I never really felt, apart from two or three races, we absolutely dominated the whole weekend.

“But for the sport, everybody wants to have a title battle with multiple teams involved.”

Ferrari have changed team bosses since the end of last season, with Mattia Binotto replaced by Fred Vasseur, while Mercedes have lost strategy director James Vowles to Williams as new principal.

“I never really think about being the favourite because you have to keep on working, you have to keep on improving because, if you’re not, they will catch up and overtake you,” added Verstappen.

“About people leaving other teams, I don’t know. It’s difficult to say from the outside if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, is it going to interrupt their work?

“If new people come in, it always takes a little bit of time to settle in... but you can still get a lot of performance out of it straight away.”

On Hamilton’s chances, Verstappen said: “He’s one of the greatest drivers. If he has the car to do it, he can fight for the title again... But it’s also about when you have the car then the pressure comes, you cannot afford big mistakes.”

Perez, meanwhile, spoke about how F1 drivers are unhappy with a rule change barring them from making unauthorised “political statements” at races and will discuss it as a group.

The governing FIA updated the International Sporting Code in December with a clause requiring prior written permission for drivers to make or display “political, religious and personal statements or comments”.

Perez believes drivers needed to be able to speak freely. “We haven’t discussed (it) with the GPDA (Grand Prix Drivers’ Association) but it’s something we don’t feel comfortable with because we want to be ourselves, we want to be able to express ourselves in any way that we want,” he said.

“We all have different views, different beliefs in religion... I get the political side but we all should be free to express ourselves.

“I just struggle to think that they will be able to control what you are able to say or not to say.

“That, to me, is not correct.”

Several drivers, notably Hamilton, have used their profile and platform to address issues. In the Briton’s case, he has spoken out about racial injustice and reported human rights abuses in some of the countries the sport visits.

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said his team had always allowed their drivers freedom to speak out but it was a question of finding a balance.

“In the world that we live in today, everybody has a voice and that shouldn’t be suppressed but, of course, it does have to be done responsibly,” he said. “We don’t want a load of robots without opinions going racing.” REUTERS