Verstappen: Red Bull still leading despite less upgrades 'a good sign'

Max Verstappen is pleased to see Red Bull maintain its lead over its main rivals despite "doing less" than its competitors in terms of upgrades.

The Milton Keynes-based outfit remains undefeated this season and heads into this weekend's British Grand Prix aiming to secure its tenth win of 2023.

With seven victories to his name, Verstappen has delivered the vast majority of those wins, a track record that has left his teammate Sergio Perez, who won in Jeddah and in Baku, 81 points adrift in the championship.

"We’ve had a great start to the year," Verstappen told the media at Silverstone on Thursday. "We are also understanding our car race after race a bit better – what we want, what we need.

"But we are not standing still. It is true that maybe other teams, they speak a bit more about updates and bigger upgrades from one to the other race.

"But we’ll still bring some stuff as well because that’s definitely necessary to stay ahead, I think.

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"It is definitely a good sign that we’ve done less than some of our competitors, I think that’s quite clear, and we still have a good margin.

"Of course some tracks it’s a bit bigger than others. But overall, it’s a strong base package, I think we have, we just always have to make sure that we get all the potential out of it."

Verstappen's margins of victory have varied according to the circuit. But it's clear that Red Bull's RB19 performs even better on F1's traditional tracks.

"I think that’s just how our car works," he said. "Street circuits, a lot of bumpy tracks, I think our car is not that fantastic. That’s why I think also the margin was a bit smaller of course in Monaco.

"Probably it wasn’t fantastic in Montreal as well, for example. And we know that there is still a few street circuits coming up where potentially it will be, again, a little harder for us."

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Verstappen has been down on luck at Silverstone in the past two years. But the Dutchman knows that only another bout of misfortune is likely to derail his prospects this weekend.

"Sometimes you have a bit of bad luck like last year but we know that our car is probably better and more competitive than last year," he said.

"So I’m just looking forward to the weekend to be honest and hopefully we just have a good result."

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