Formula 1 World Champion Max Verstappen has revealed he was under intense pain on the final lap of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
The 24-year old Red Bull driver in an absolute turn of events overtook title rival Lewis Hamilton on the last lap winning the final race claiming the 2021 Championship title.
Verstappen initiated the overtake on Turn 5 after the end of a controversial Safety Car that brought about a lot of criticism on the manner in which the Safety car situation was handled. Mercedes went ahead to protest the matter to the Race Stewards but was dismissed, however the team declared they have no intentions of appealing the matter further.
With the issue put to rest, Verstappen was free to receive the championship trophy at the FIA Prize Giving Gala yesterday. The Red Bull driver admitted his chances to win the championship title seemed lost until the final lap when he pulled off an overtake on Hamilton.
“Throughout that whole race we didn’t have the pace,” said Verstappen. “It didn’t look like we were going to win because the last few races we were just a bit behind.
“But I never gave up. I always said to myself I’m not going to make it look easy for them. I’m just going to keep pushing and I’m going to try everything I can to at least keep the gap close. And that’s what we did.”
Red Bull “did a great job with the strategy always putting new tyres on at the right time”, said Verstappen. That left him on fresh set of soft tyres at the end of the race while Hamilton had 44-lap-old hard rubber for what turned out to be a one-lap restart.
“You do need a bit of luck sometimes,” Verstappen admitted. “When you look throughout the whole season, we had a lot of bad luck and I actually lost a lot of points already. So otherwise it would have been a completely different championship. But that’s always, you have the ‘ifs’.
“So, going into that race and then seeing it was not happening, I wasn’t very happy at the time for 55 laps or something. But then we had one lap to go and I knew I had the better tyres on. I was like, ‘well, I have nothing to lose now.’”
However, as he restarted the race in Hamilton’s slipstream, Verstappen was struck by a sudden pain. “I started to cross the line for the last lap and I got a massive cramp in my leg,” he explained. “So I had to deal with that in my throttle leg as well.
“So when I was going to go for the move into turn five, I had a massive cramp. I was actually very happy there was a corner coming up because I could actually brake. But that was also then the move to go into the lead, which was great.”
Having got ahead of Hamilton, Verstappen had to keep him behind through the runs to turns six and seven and again to turn nine. “There were two long straights to defend and to deal with a cramp like that is not very nice,” he said.
“But I also knew that I’m fighting for a world championship here, and it’s always been my dream. So I was just biting through that moment. On TV you don’t see these kind of things but it was very painful.
“Of course to then come over the line all the emotions came out. I didn’t even know what to say. We were just screaming. I never had so many people screaming into my earpieces. I think I’m still a bit deaf.”
