Verstappen, motivated: "The car has done everything well"

March 18, 2022

Since the winter tests, Red Bull has positioned itself as one of the great favorites for the new Formula 1 season in 2022 and, on Friday’s day in Bahrain, Max Verstappen has confirmed the good feelings.

It only took one lap for the RB18 to move to the top of the timesheets thanks to a lap time from the Dutch driver on medium tyres, although Verstappen focused on making long runs for the rest of FP1 and ended up dropping several places.

However, the Red Bull driver did dare to ride the softer Pirelli compound in FP2 of the Bahrain GP and closed Friday with the best time on the grid, a 1’31.936 which finally helped him to get ahead of the Ferraris of Leclerc and Sainz.

Analyzing everything that happened on the first day of action on the F1 track in 2022, Max Verstappen acknowledged being very happy, but assured that Friday’s results are still not relevant at all and explained that we will have to wait for the Bahrain GP classification .

“The car felt good. We tried a few things and they all seemed to be working fine. It’s been a pretty smooth and quiet day actually, so I’m really happy with that.”

“We were doing very well in short and long runs, the car has done everything well. I am very happy, but Ferrari is pushing very hard, I think they are very close, but that is also exciting for the category.”

“We have to wait and see how everything goes a little bit, tomorrow we will really know where we are.”

On the problems of Mercedes, which seem not to find the rhythm, the Dutchman said that he had not been surprised, but that he preferred to wait until Saturday to draw the first conclusions.

“I insist, I think we will have to wait and see what happens tomorrow, when everyone is with their engines at maximum, then we will see what is reality in all this.”

With six different cars in the top ten in FP2 at the Bahrain Grand Prix, Max Verstappen believes that having an increasingly compact grid will be beneficial to Formula 1.

“That’s good, I think that’s generally what everybody wants, right? All the teams are a little bit closer. And I think as time goes on we’ll still get closer, so I think that’s good.” the Red Bull driver concluded.