Max Verstappen on McLaren’s strength: “In that car you wouldn’t have even seen me”

Max Verstappen has quipped that if he was driving McLaren’s Formula 1 car “then you wouldn’t have seen me” despite his dominant pole position and victory at the Japanese Grand Prix.

The Red Bull driver took his fourth consecutive win at Suzuka, fending off both McLaren drivers in the grand prix on Sunday after securing a stunning pole position on Saturday, which completed a remarkable turnaround having appeared off the pace on Friday.

“When I came here, I didn’t expect to win here – and after Friday, not at all,” Verstappen said to Viaplay after the race. “Starting on pole was the most important thing this weekend. McLaren was faster I think, but they couldn’t get into the DRS to make a move.”

Asked for his reaction to the victory and whether the win was entirely down to the driver, Verstappen responded light-heartedly: “I’m very happy with what I’m doing. I don’t even want to think about if I’d been in that other car [McLaren]. Then you wouldn’t have seen me.”

Verstappen was then quick to call it a team effort with Red Bull having unlocked more pace from the RB21 car.

“In the end it’s always a team that works well together, with GP [Gianpiero Lambiase] and this weekend I also had another performance engineer, Hugh Bird,” he said. “I worked with him until the end of 2020 as well and that actually went really well.

“We made the right choices before we went into qualifying. If you listen to the onboards, it runs very smoothly between me and GP. Those are things that are very important though.”

Despite his breakthrough win in 2025, Verstappen was also quick to temper expectations as he heads into the next round in Bahrain just one point behind Lando Norris at the top of the drivers’ standings.

“This was a great result, but it was difficult to overtake and qualifying was very important here,” he said. “This does not mean that everything is now suddenly hosanna and that we are going to win all the races, but we can be very happy with this.”

Three factors that helped Red Bull

Verstappen detailed three critical factors that aided Red Bull in the Japanese GP on Sunday: the difference between clean and dirty air, low tyre wear on the new track surface and lower temperatures – a notable change given the previous Red Bull cars would often perform stronger relative to rivals in hot conditions.

“You could see that at the end of a stint they were getting closer again and trying to attack, because my tyres were getting a bit too hot then,” he explained. “I think it helped us that it was a bit colder today, so we had less overheating of the tyres – which is still always a problem for us.

“[There are] a lot of fast corners and that makes it very hard to follow. The tyres get very hot when you get close to someone. The cars get better every year as well, with a lot of dirty air, so it just gets harder and harder. When the lap times are quite close together without a lot of tyre degradation, then it becomes very difficult.”