Max Verstappen secured a double prize this Saturday at the Austrian Grand Prix, victory in the sprint race and pole position for the second race of the weekend.
The current world champion saw Charles Leclerc make a great start and quickly tried to close all the spaces to avoid overtaking in the first corner and stay in the lead.
At turn 3, Verstappen was attacked by the other Ferrari, Carlos Sainz’s, but the Dutchman was also able to defend himself against that attempt to pass through the inside of the curve. Ultimately, those two turned out to be the only threats to his lead in this Saturday’s sprint race.
After unsuccessfully trying to overtake the Red Bull driver, the Ferrari drivers began to fight among themselves and that allowed the #1 to open a gap and secure the first position. During the rest of the race nobody bothered him and he managed to cross the checkered flag first, adding all the maximum possible points in the sprint races of the 2022 Formula 1 season.
As soon as the race was over, the Dutchman was proud of having given his fans exactly what they had come for: “It was very nice to see, with all that orange smoke at the end,” he said, referring to the great crowd of Dutch displaced to Spielberg to enjoy the weekend of F1.
Max Verstappen acknowledged that he had given everything to win and that the fight between Sainz and Leclerc clearly benefited him: “It was a good race. At the beginning I had a good pace and then it was more even. It was as a sprint should be: practically at full throttle all the time. In the first few laps the Ferrari drivers were fighting each other so that allowed me to open up a gap. Afterwards our pace was pretty similar.”
Despite taking victory in relative comfort today, the Dutchman expects a tough race this Sunday at the Red Bull Ring: “It will be an interesting battle again. The race is much longer, so it will be difficult in terms of the tires”.
“We’ll see [if I can repeat the victory]. The car is good, although we still have to fine-tune some things. But in general we are quite competitive this weekend,” he concluded.
