Verstappen: I'll be even better next year

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Max Verstappen says he will be even better in 2017 compared to team-mate Daniel Ricciardo as he gets more comfortable at Red Bull.

The 18-year-old has enjoyed a rapid rise through the motorsport ranks, doing one year of F3 before making his F1 debut for Toro Rosso and then being promoted to Red Bull earlier this year. In the opening four rounds, Verstappen says he could notice the difference in having experience of a similar car on each track and he says that will be visible at Red Bull next year.

“I think the most important thing is just be yourself and focus on what can be done better because in my first race I got in five times before I won my race, it’s all so new," Verstappen told F1i during an exclusive interview. "Even the procedures were just so new to me, even doing that race I was not using the full potential of the tools I had, all those kind of things.

“So I’m still learning, I'm still improving and I don’t think it's just in terms of pace, it's everything around to get to a certain pace. It’s like getting all the little bits together to extract one more tenth or two more tenths, it's not the driving in myself because I know how to drive the car right now. From there on it’s just building experience.

“The thing is I don’t have the data from myself from last year in this team so I always have to rely on old data. With Toro Rosso when I came to the first four races I knew what I was doing, I was like ‘this I’ve experience last year’. The car is not that much different at the end of the day so you know how to work and you know which direction to go.

“Here it’s all new, they give you a direction and you have to work in that direction. When you have the experience from last year maybe you want to go in a slightly different direction, because you know how to drive the car, you know how you like the car and sometimes you have to swap a bit to another direction. But that will only get better and better. Next year whenever I come back, it is a new car but you have a bit more feeling to it and that will definitely help.”

Verstappen has outscored Ricciardo by five points since they became team-mates at Red Bull at the Spanish Grand Prix.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.