Max Verstappen enjoyed a perfect Sprint on Saturday, comfortably outpacing the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton in P2 and the rest of the grid.<\/p>\n
However, a more difficult challenge lies in front of the Dutchman for Sunday’s race after a off track violation saw him plummet down to P6 in qualifying.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless given his form in 2023, and considering his pace in the Sprint, many put him as firm favorite for the win despite the low grid position.<\/p>\n
The reigning champion was even more optimistic than the pundits, stating that he hopes his race pace is even stronger than that shown on Saturday.<\/p>\n
“The pace has been always there, just unfortunate with a track limits in the first qualifying.” he said.<\/p>\n
“But with the pace I think we had today, hopefully with more fuel in the car tomorrow it will be even better. We will find out tomorrow but for sure this was a very positive day for us and hopefully we show something similar out there tomorrow.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Max Verstappen enjoyed a perfect Sprint on Saturday, comfortably outpacing the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton in P2 and the rest of the grid. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4224,"featured_media":466686,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false},"tags":[17288,17289],"news_category":[16921],"gn_keywords":[17971,17900],"acf":{"announce":"The Dutchman will have to make ground as he starts from P6","video":[]},"rank_math_focus_keyword":"","rank_math_description":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_robots":"","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_facebook_title":"","rank_math_facebook_description":"","rank_math_facebook_image":"","rank_math_twitter_title":"","rank_math_twitter_description":"","rank_math_twitter_image":"","rank_math_snippet_shortcode":"","rank_math_primary_category":"","rankmath_seo":{"focus_keyword":"","description":"","title":"","canonical_url":"","robots":"","facebook":{"title":"","description":"","image":""},"twitter":{"title":"","description":"","image":""}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/466685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/466685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":466687,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/466685\/revisions\/466687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466685"},{"taxonomy":"news_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news_category?post=466685"},{"taxonomy":"gn_keywords","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gn_keywords?post=466685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}