Masterful Max Verstappen makes light work of Monte Carlo streets

Max Verstappen romped to his fourth win in six races with a dominant performance in changeable conditions at the Monaco Grand Prix.

The Dutchman, starting from the crucial pole position in Monte Carlo, where it is notoriously tough to overtake, raced away from second-placed Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin, making his medium compound tyres last beyond their believed life-span before rain hit in the closing stages.

With the field switching onto intermediate Pirellis, Verstappen extended his lead further, despite several brushes against the wall with his Red Bull Racing RB19 to win by nearly 30 seconds.

To hammer home his advantage, he twice lapped team-mate and championship contender Sergio Perez, who started last after crashing at Saint Devote in Q1.

With the Mexican failing to score, Verstappen’s lead in the standings is now 39 points ahead of this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.

“It’s super nice to win here again in Monaco!” he said, having won the race back in 2021 also. “It was actually quite a difficult race, we were on the medium to begin with and Fernando on the hard compound, so we didn’t want the first stint to be that long but we had to stay out.

“The rain also made it quite complicated, we made the call for inters, the first few laps on them were incredibly slippery. I clipped the walls a few times again, but that’s Monaco.

“When you are that far in the lead, you don’t want to push that hard but also you don’t want to lose too much time.

“We managed to stay calm and bring it home and we scored a good amount of points for the team.”

Perez, who finished 16th, said his weekend was the worst he had raced for a long time.

He said: “Everything went wrong and today we paid the price for a poor mistake from myself in qualifying. I am really sad about the performance, not just today but the whole weekend.

“I knew yesterday would be extremely costly and ultimately it was 25 points.

“The conditions were tricky out there and there was some hope that when it started raining we could get things right but we didn’t, it was a shame. I don’t think there was much we could have done differently; all the damage was done yesterday. I only want to move on from this race because it was a terrible weekend.

“I still have hope in the Championship but I know I cannot afford another zero in a race, so I really hope I can be back to my normal level in Barcelona.”