Max Verstappen coy on Lewis Hamilton title fight after testing new Red Bull

F1: Verstappen puts in hard graft ahead of new season

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Max Verstappen does not want to “hype up” his chances of dethroning Lewis Hamilton this season and refused to talk about how he will take the fight to Mercedes. Red Bull have their best opportunity in years to return to the top of F1.

Mercedes have won every Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship since wrestling the power off Red Bull in 2014.

However, the Silver Arrows have refocussed a lot of their resources onto their 2022 car, when new F1 regulations will come into play.

That means they have taken one eye off the ball and Red Bull can capitalise.

Verstappen has never finished within 100 points of Hamilton but this could be the year he finally takes the fight to the Brit – even if he does not admit it.

“It’s all looking promising but it doesn’t make sense now to hype it all up,” Verstappen said.

“First, it’s more important to get to the track in Bahrain and try to do the best amount of learning we can on the car and the engine to optimise everything.

“We want to stay low-key and focus on our job. We should do the talking on the track, not next to the track. That’s what I prefer.”

Verstappen got to drive his new car for the first time at Silverstone on Wednesday but he is not giving any secrets away.

“We have to go to Bahrain and look at it there, at the first race, and see if we succeeded or not,” the 23-year-old explained.

“We know where we want to be and where we want to get to and that’s what we now need to try and realise.

“People always talked about the rear-end being so twitchy, I think it’s just general grip we were lacking a bit.

“Also, we were a bit down on power. We know that – there’s no secret behind it, you can see it. So we worked a lot with Honda throughout the winter.”

He added: “The floor is still a big change. To try to recover all that downforce loss will be important.

“It is going to be interesting to see who did the best.

“At the moment of course I don’t know where we are.

“Mercedes was still the dominant car towards the end of the season so we of course know we have to keep improving.”

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