Max Verstappen delights home fans with second on Spa grid

Max Verstappen has delighted thousands of visiting Dutch fans by securing second place on the grid at Spa, his best qualifying position to date.

The Red Bull driver, who missed most of FP3 due to a sensor issue, lost pole to Nico Rosberg by just over a tenth of a second.

“I mean, you can always do a better job,” he said. “But also I think also Nico could have done a better lap; it’s always when you put everything together. But I think in the end to be so close to them on a track with some long straights, we can be very pleased with that.

“The whole weekend has been very smooth, even though I had some little issues this morning. From there on the mechanics did a great job and in qualifying the car was working really well, as you could see in sector two. I’m just very pleased to be second here in front of my fans, it’s just a great motivation when you see them next to the track.”

Verstappen is the only driver in the top five to have qualified in Q2 on the supersoft tires rather than the softs, and thus he is committed to using them for the start.

“I decided, together with the team, that I wanted to run the supersoft. I think that’s the best strategy to go into tomorrow – but we’ll see how it pays off.”

Regarding the race he said his plan was “to start on the supersoft and then see where we end up after a few laps. We have some different strategies out there but I think at the end of the day, yeah, I have to box a bit earlier – but after this there are a lot of laps to go and we’ll see what happens.”