Ferstappen: “It wasn’t easy to plan clever tricks, but we did it”

Max Ferstappen’s tactics that gave him victory in Jeddah focused on two areas. The first was maintaining his hard tires for nearly 30 laps after his simultaneous pit stop with rival Charles Leclerc on lap 16 to make his attack on the final 10 laps.

The second was the DRS games before the last corner of the track. This is where the DRS tracking point is located, giving any rider less than a second behind the lead the open wing advantage in a straight line – an advantage that is huge at Jeddah in particular.

On lap 42, Leclerc almost gave the lead to Ferstappen before the last corner, giving the Monegasque the big advantage over the DRS on the long straight. And so it happened, and Leclerc soon took the lead again. Ferstappen realized he had to be smarter about it next time – but when he tried the same spot two laps later, he locked his brakes and tried to let Leclerc pass.

It’s a completely paradoxical way of two riders fighting for victory. In the same way and for the same reason, Ferstappen braked in Jeddah last year, resulting in Hamilton (who also didn’t want to pass) hitting Red Bull in the rear. Finally Ferstappen managed to move into lap 47 tonight and even kept the difference with Leclerc’s DRS.

“It wasn’t easy to plan clever tricks in the last corner, but I finally managed to get through. But Leclerc was firmly in the DRS zone again.”said the Dutchman. “It seems that if you get close enough, if you get like half a second, you can have a good exit. And that makes it harder to try to overtake, say, in the last corner compared to last year , it’s more difficult.” to plan the overtaking you’re going to make”.

In addition, Ferstappen played well in the waiting game with tire management, closely following Leclerc for 30 laps: “Ferrari is very fast in the corners, we are on the straight, but the tires wore out very quickly here. In the end we saw that we had a little more speed and I tried to overtake.”said the champion.

And he concluded: “It was a really difficult game but a good one. We’re fighting at the top and we’ve just started playing the waiting game. It was difficult but I’m very happy that we moved our year forward.”

RBR CEO Christian Horner said: “It was a very patient race from Max. He protected the tires until the end and then the last safety car launched his attack. Ferrari have a great car and great drivers. It was a very tough fight today and if we that expected.” . it’s going to be something epic for the rest of the season.

The Briton also pointed to the unlucky man of the day, Sergio Perez, who missed out on a possible win by pitting just before Nicolas Latifi crashed, which brought the safety car off the track. Perez, said Horner, “He drove great all three days. He will gain a lot of confidence. He took pole position, controlled the race and was just unlucky with the safety car, but that happens sometimes.”