Unfair to Pass Hamilton When Held Up: Verstappen

Max Verstappen has declared himself pleased with his second-place finish in the Singapore Grand Prix despite Red Bull’s engine concerns, and added that he felt it ‘wouldn’t have been fair’ to pass eventual winner Lewis Hamilton when he was held up by back markers.

The gap between Verstappen and Hamilton narrowed to a second as a positional battle between Romain Grosjean and Sergey Sirotkin, with the French driver choosing to ignore blue flags, holding up the frustrated Brit and allowing the Red Bull to get within range.

Eventually Hamilton had to defend and eventually got through, going on to win by over eight second in what was a routine victory.

But when speaking to Sky Sports after the race, Verstappen felt that, all things considered, he was content with second and that attempting to squeeze past Hamilton in that situation would not have been right.

He said: “It was not bad. It was a shame from the first lap because you can really see we missed top speed. But the team had a great strategy and we could get back into second and basically did our own race.

“We tried to follow Lewis a little bit and at the end we knew that second was going to be the result so we just needed to bring it home.

“[On Hamilton being held up] At first I thought it was not fair anyway with the way he was being held up, and even if I had the opportunity you can’t overtake going into turn 10, so I didn’t want to take the risk.”

Verstappen was however less complimentary towards his car’s engine and feels the team was able to achieve an optimum finish in spite of the problems they faced.

He added: “I was really confident that it would last but it was really poor to drive. I almost had to stop behind the safety car because it was not finding a gear, then in the pit stop I’m not sure what was going on, it was not that great.

“Throughout the race I couldn’t short shift, but we managed to finish second.”