Horner praises Verstappen for hard-fought win: 'Huge pressure'

Max Verstappen may have won the Imola Grand Prix, but he was put under pressure by Lando Norris from start to finish. Red Bull Racing team boss Christian Horner was therefore in suspense until the finish and talks about what his team could possibly have done better after the Formula 1 race.

The fact that Verstappen had received a warning from the FIA for exceeding track limits fairly early in the race did not make things any better in terms of tension within the Austrian Formula One team. Horner, therefore, felt the pressure quite a bit. "Massive pressure, because he'd had three strikes with track limits, he couldn't afford to put a millimetre wrong with all that pressure. A great, great, great job by Max withstanding the pressure," the team boss jubilated in a conversation with Sky Sports.

"Lando was coming hard at the end of the race there. It was a race of two halves for us. The first half of the race was very strong. We got up to a seven-and-a-half, eight-second lead. But then the second half of that last stint, Lando started to really catch us very quickly," Horner reflected.

"You can see the cars are converging, the latest upgrades. You can see they're all becoming very, very similar, the Ferrari as well. There's a real convergence, which always is going to happen when you've got stable rules. So it's nothing we haven't expected. But at this circuit, again, McLaren very quick, and Ferrari as well," concluded the 50-year-old Briton.