20/04/2025
NEWS STORY
Max Verstappen: "Overall, it was a very promising race.
"We were a bit unfortunate with the penalty, but besides that the car was strong. We had a lot of difficulties on Friday with our tyre management, so to have such a positive Saturday and Sunday meant that we really improved the car a lot. I was positively surprised to see how competitive we were on the mediums. I, of course had to try and open up a gap, but to actually pull away from the cars behind was nice. Afterwards on the hards, it took a bit of time before I felt fully comfortable and we were getting a bit of understeer in the car. Despite everything in the race, getting P2 quite close behind Oscar was overall a positive weekend for us. Of course, on tracks with higher degradation we still have more work to do, but we did well today with the set up, the car went well and we had really good race pace. Especially after Bahrain, this was a good weekend to finish off the triple header and we just need to keep working and be as consistent as possible. It really has been a good and positive race and it is promising for the races ahead."
Yuki Tsunoda: "It was really unfortunate to be involved in a racing incident so early in the race today. I was fully in control before the incident, Carlos was also right in front of me, and there was just nowhere for me to go as it happened at the tightest corner on this track. I did as much as I could to avoid any incidents, but then I unfortunately had rear wing damage and I couldn't continue safely in the race. It's painful to collide with anyone, especially Pierre as we are friends, and this was not ideal for either of us as at the end of the day we are fighting for points and success, and my goal is to achieve as much as possible every weekend. Every lap is very important to me and to learn something and to experience the car more, a shame that something like this happened at an early stage of the race. The positive from the weekend is that I feel like we have made progress, being in Q3 again, and I feel like my confidence is building more and more. Next we have some testing in the RB19 before Miami, and then I am excited to go again with the Team and hopefully have a better result and bring home some points."
Christian Horner: "Firstly, congrats to Oscar on the win. Arguably without that penalty we would have won today, so there are a lot of positives to take, a lot of lessons and we know where we have to improve. We believed Max was clearly ahead on the first lap and it was a very harsh decision but at that point it was best to concede, serve the penalty, get your head down and keep going. What was a great shame today was that you can see our pace was very similar to the McLaren and after the first stint on the medium we were in good shape. We pulled a gap to Oscar on the first stint and the pace was really there for Max, he was getting the most out of the car, let's not forget on Friday McLaren had 1.2 seconds on everybody. It was our most competitive race to date this season in terms of raw pace, but it wasn't to be. Ultimately, they were good, important points today and we are only 12 points off the lead of the Drivers' Championship and took a few points out of Lando, so we have everything to play for. It was a huge shame for Yuki because he was up there on the grid and likely to score good points for us, he's missed out on valuable time in the car, but there was really nothing more he could do and around here there is always the risk of an incident. Overall, we feel in a positive place heading to Miami."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Jeddah here.