Verstappen: "If I had started at the front, I would have finished second"

It's not often this season that Max Verstappen has been so happy with second place. In a weekend where he looked set to lose a lot of points to Lewis Hamilton, he managed to limit the damage thanks to a shower of rain.

Maximum result for Verstappen

"We made the right decision with that change to the intermediates. That's why we ended up second, which of course I'm extremely happy with," the Red Bull Racing driver told Ziggo Sport afterwards. "To be honest, I think if I had just started at the front this would have been the maximum result as well. So in the end we didn't lose anything at all."

Before that rain, things looked less rosy for the Dutchman. "I went to medium tyres quite early and that was just tricky at the end. You try to start on the hard tyre to go long, but that tyre didn't hold up either. Then you go to medium tyres too early and you can't really push," he commented on his difficult second stint.