Verstappen after win in Monaco: 'Never thought I would break this record'

Before Max Verstappen could finally start celebrating the win in his hometown of Monaco, he had to be the last of all duty to join the press conference for the writing media. The Dutchman looked back on a race that was pretty tough.

"Yeah, it was quite hectic towards the end, but also, I think the whole race was all about management because Fernando starting on the hard made me do a very long stint, probably almost double what we would have liked. But because of the rain in the area, we couldn't really stop [earlier]."

Risk of rain

Verstappen started the race on mediums, and Alonso did so on hards. It ended up being, due to the rain, a hassle with the tyres. "I mean, if it would have been nice and sunny, I would have stopped with the hard tyre on, and then you catch up, and you wait until Fernando does his pit stop. But we couldn't do that because the risk of rain was around, so I had to stay out. The tyres were graining. I had to go through that graining phase, which wasn't that easy."

But, Verstappen confessed, the tyres suddenly got better. "Luckily, it picked up a little bit. But then, of course, it started to rain, and yeah, with really worn tyres to go through, there was not really enjoyable. I clipped a few barriers, especially on my in-lap, I think. It was very, very difficult. But even on the intermediates after that, it was still very slippery through the second sector. It was quite wet there. And yeah, the hard bit is that you have a good lead, but of course, you don't want to risk too much, but you also don't want to drive too slow because then you have no temperature in your tyres."

Past Vettel

With his win, Verstappen passed Sebastian Vettel. This is his 39th win for Red Bull, one more than the German had for the team. "If you have a good car for a while, you can break these kinds of numbers, but yeah, it's great. I would have never thought that I would be in this position in my career when I grew up. I mean, I wanted to be a Formula One driver and now winning these races is amazing. It's better than I could ever imagine."