He believes he has the auto, the talent and the form to outpace both Ferraris and his Red Bull teammate Daniel Ricciardo in Sunday’s race at the Hungaroring and in the title chase.
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Verstappen, 18, triumphed on his debut, becoming the sport’s youngest grand prix victor.
Verstappen and Red Bull are expected to be highly competitive at the hot, dusty and twisting Hungaroring circuit with many observers tipping them to challenge Mercedes for a victory.
The stewards also investigated Nico Rosberg over alleged speeding under yellow flags during his pole position lap.
When asked if third was the aim, he replied: “Yeah, we are pretty close but we will see where we end up at the end of the season”.
This was obviously created to deal with inherently slow cars, but the problem today was that in the hard conditions of Q1 no fewer than 11 drivers failed to pass the 107 percent mark, and five progress to the next stage of qualifying, and it is those five who are in question. “Let’s see what happens – I just hope we can fight for the title”.
“If next year we have a great vehicle and can fight for a world title and we are going at hammer and tongs, then I’m sure at some point we will cross paths. We’ll be there and obviously we start close enough to the front to make a fight of it”.
On the conditions of Saturday’s F1 action, the Red Bull driver admitted that the rain wasn’t ideal as they had to adapt quickly and judge when the right time was to go on wets, inters or slicks.
Ricciardo’s teammate Verstappen was a further 0.74s slower on Friday afternoon, a gap he attributed to a mistake in the final sector on his super-soft tire run. While declaring it was an “impressive day”, he was keen to separate practice from the weekend proper.
“That’s great, a bit of a mix-up”.
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“We got everything done in terms of qualifying and race-sim work and it’s all looking very good”. “You don’t really have much time to think”.
