“It feels fantastic”, the Dutch youngster said after finally coming down from the top of Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix podium.
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Daniel Ricciardo has spoken out about the pit strategy that saw him go from first position to fourth during Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix.
15 May 2016. Becomes Formula One’s youngest race victor at the Spanish Grand Prix, aged 18 years and 227 days.
“A very hard situation for the team, we lost points”, Wolff said.
That led to a thrilling battle between the Red Bull and Ferrari cars, with three different strategies playing out across the four drivers.
“The mechanics were telling me that even the way he gets in the vehicle is similar, the same side, the way he pulls his knee up to get in the chassis”.
What is even more astonishing is that he has set the record for being the youngest ever driver to win a Formula One race, at just 18 years.
“I had a great start but it wasn’t a very easy race for me”.
The young Verstappen said he was probably being picked up from kindergarten when Raikkonen was winning his first race back in 2003, when he was nearly 6 years old. “I never thought for a moment that after only just changing teams such a thing could happen, not in this way, but we knew we had more chances to win”. Vettel also pitted for softs, while Verstappen and Raikkonen stayed out, eventually getting medium tyres.
Verstappen completed 118 laps of the Circuit de Catalunya on Wednesday, setting a best time of 1m23.267s, and ended up 0.739s clear of second placed Stoffel Vandoorne of McLaren-Honda.
When Red Bull signed the then 16-year-old for their Toro Rosso junior team in 2014, ahead of his debut in 2015, the sport was so concerned that it introduced a minimum age rule to keep out other such precocious talents.
Asked where Verstappen can go from here, Horner replied: “To come in and qualify on the second row and win your first Grand Prix, it can only get worse! Until the last corner he kept doing everything right”.
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Max celebrates with his father Jos Verstappen. “It’s an incredible achievement from our side, because he helped me a lot in the beginning of my career, up until Formula One, so without him I wouldn’t have won”.
