Max Verstappen was left to hail his \u201cincredible\u201d podium result at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, the Dutchman having climbed through the field from a pit lane start to secure third place at Interlagos.<\/p>\n
Having made gains at the start, Verstappen<\/a> dropped back down the order again after being forced to make an early pit stop due to picking up a puncture. From there, however, he embarked on an impressive recovery drive that saw him challenge Mercedes<\/a>\u2019 Kimi Antonelli<\/a> for P2 in the closing stages.<\/p>\n While he ultimately could not pass the Italian, Verstappen was still delighted to claim P3<\/a>, an outcome that he conceded was not something he had expected a few hours earlier.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the race was quite full on \u2013 a lot of action,\u201d the four-time World Champion summarised afterwards. \u201cI had to overtake some cars, of course, coming from the pit lane. I think our pace was quite strong over all the stints.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes it\u2019s difficult to know fully with traffic and stuff, but to be on the podium from the pit lane\u2026 I didn\u2019t expect that at all, even with a puncture as well at the beginning of the race. That\u2019s why we had to box again.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an incredible result for us so I\u2019m very happy with that, and just very proud of everyone within the team as well. Yesterday was very tough for us, but we never give up. We always try to improve and try to find more lap time, and luckily we found that again today.\u201d<\/p>\n A late pit stop for a set of fresh soft tyres helped Verstappen to go on the chase. When asked how he decided on the amount of risk to take following that stop, the Red Bull<\/a> driver explained: \u201cI was just trying to pass as fast as possible, because you don\u2019t want to lose too much time.<\/p>\n \u201cSome cars were also in a DRS train so it\u2019s not always straightforward. With all that, to finish only 10 seconds from the lead, I think for us is incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n Reflecting further on this later as he spoke to the media, Verstappen said of his team\u2019s approach: \u201cWe are all in this together and we never give up. We take risks, yes, but I like that, to always try and be better because we don\u2019t want to settle for second.\u201d<\/p>\n While the result has taken Red Bull up to third place in the Teams\u2019 Championship<\/a> \u2013 given Ferrari<\/a>\u2019s double retirement from the race \u2013 Verstappen still added further to his own tally in the Drivers\u2019 standings<\/a>, with his total now at 341 points.<\/p>\n Despite this, the 28-year-old \u2013 who is 49 points adrift of championship leader Lando Norris<\/a> and 25 away from Oscar Piastri<\/a> in second \u2013 is downplaying the prospect of fighting for the title.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s too many points to really have a proper chance at that, I think,\u201d said Verstappen. \u201cIf you look of course at the whole season, we gave away too many points from the beginning until the middle of the season.<\/p>\n \u201cI think for us now to the end is trying to just have these highlights, have good race weekends and see what we can do to the end. But yeah, a lot of things that I guess we also still want to analyse from the whole weekend, but at least the race was very promising.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Verstappen was left to hail his \u201cincredible\u201d podium result at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, the Dutchman…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-276213","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}