Verstappen ‘not very happy with myself’ despite Suzuka pole
Max Verstappen is concerned about his potential race pace despite continuing his run of pole positions at the Japanese Grand Prix.
Verstappen maintained his 100 percent pole position record in 2024, with his fifth pole in a row stretching back to the final race of last season. However, with a rain-hit FP2 limiting the practice time on high fuel that teams have had, Verstappen says he is not as confident as usual in his race performance at this stage of the weekend.
“I think so far, I haven’t been happy with my long runs,” Verstappen said. “The pace wasn’t what I would have liked, so there’s a bit of a question mark going into tomorrow, because looking at the long runs, especially Ferrari, they look very comfortable. So maybe they were not so quick over one lap today, but they were definitely fast in the long run, so we’ll have to wait and see how that will evolve tomorrow in the race.
“Also [McLaren looks] quite decent. I’m just not very happy with myself, with how my long run was, so then naturally everyone else looks a bit better.
“I cannot look inside the Ferrari garage why [it didn’t qualify on the front row], but it’s quite obvious that then in the long run they seem quite competitive. So, we’ll see tomorrow why that is or if it actually is the case like that.
“From our side, I have some ideas of what we have to look into to make tomorrow better, and that’s also what we already changed after FP3. So hopefully that will be better for tomorrow. Our race pace is still not too bad, but it’s not how I have been feeling in some of the races this year, last year, as comfortable, let’s say it like that. But hopefully with the changes that we made, it will be better.”
Verstappen also only took pole position by 0.066s over teammate Sergio Perez, explaining how challenging it was to get the perfect lap around the iconic Suzuka circuit.
“I think around here at Suzuka, it’s always very nice when the fuel comes out, the balance is more or less there. It’s always very, very nice. The car’s improving every single year, it makes it even better, especially the high speed, it feels really cool. So that made it really nice today.
“I started to lose time from Turn 13 onwards, it’s very sensitive around here with the tires, as soon as you push maybe a bit too hard in sector one, you run out of tires to the end, and that’s what happened to me on my final lap.
“That’s why I didn’t really improve a lot, also my last chicane, because my front tires were giving up, I didn’t hit the curb how it should have been. That’s it, it wasn’t ideal. It was still good enough, so of course I always want it to be perfect, but that’s not possible. So luckily it was still good enough today.”
While Perez was so close to pole position he was satisfied with his first top-two qualifying result since Miami last year, and attributes a major step forward compared to the end of last season to a more simplified approach.
“Like Carlos [Sainz] would say, we stopped inventing!” Perez said. “We were playing around with the car too much, far too much, and just going through it. I think now we have a much better base, we are a lot happier and the weekends just progress.
“I think when we came here last year, we were at the stage of our season where [nothing] was working, and when you are in that, you just go in circles and circles, and in the end, towards the end of the year, we found it was better just to take a step back and don’t try to chase it too much with the set-up, because then you start compromising other things.
“I think that’s been the case for this year. I’m a lot more comfortable, a lot more happier, and the confidence is slowly coming back.”
