Max Verstappen has broken silence on missing the pole position during qualifying for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
According to Formula 1, the Red Bull driver on Saturday, May 17, 2025, narrowly missed out on pole position after finishing three hundredths down on McLaren rival Oscar Piastri after an incident-packed, disrupted session at the Imola circuit.
Verstappen focused on the weekend race
Reflecting on the qualifying session, the Dutch-Belgian said, “I think everything was going really well, it’s just this softest compound is very difficult to keep alive around the lap. Sector 1 was good, and then the tyres fell away from me. From there onwards like tiny margins.”
“It was cool, but then you could see George, he set his lap on the mediums, so maybe they were a bit too soft for this track. For us, at least, it was a bit more difficult to extract the most out of it, I felt a bit happier on the medium,” he added.
Some of the drivers, including George Russell, Fernando Alonso, and Lance Stroll, used the medium tyres (C5) in qualifying, which helped them, as Russell qualified third and Alonso and Stroll finished fifth and eighth.
The 27-year-old new dad further asserted, “But the race is tomorrow, that’s where you score the points, of course, so that’s what we have to focus on, but I did think that today was a very good day for us.”
Notably, Verstappen trails Piastri by 32 points in the Drivers' Championship, while the Red Bull is 141 points behind McLaren in the Teams' Championship.
