Verstappen closes in on F1 crown after Italian GP victory

Max Verstappen could claim his second F1 world championship at the next race after he won his fifth race in a row on Sunday, claiming the Italian Grand Prix.

The Dutchman’s dominance of the sport this season continued at Monza as he overcame a five-place grid-penalty with ease to beat home-crowd favourite Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari at a canter, with the race finishing behind the safety car.

It means the Red Bull man just needs to out-score Leclerc by nine points in Singapore to wrap up his second world title with five races remaining.

“We were very quickly back up to P3 and even into P2, then I could set my sights on Charles and I could see we had better tyre degradation.

“Overall if you look at the pace of our car this weekend, especially today, I think we were strong. The pace was good on every tyre and we were comfortably the quickest on the track.

“You have to try and be as perfect as you can be and on most occasions this season, we have been pretty good.”

Like Verstappen, Sergio Perez also took a grid-penalty in Italy, and stared 13th on the grid. Despite an early stop for hard tyres dropping him to the back of the field, and a front brake fire, the Mexican came through the field to finish sixth.

He said: “My race got compromised fairly early when my front right brake disk got super-hot and was basically on fire, so we had to make the decision to pitstop.

“The first laps on the hard I couldn’t get any temperature into the tyres because I had to lift and coast, I was losing a lot of lap time and my first stint was compromised. That affected my whole race and I had to massively manage my breaks, it was critical at that point because I could have lost them and had to retire the car.

“In the end we boxed thinking we could get Lewis back on the softs but unfortunately the safety car meant we didn’t get the chance.

“For me it wasn’t a good weekend and we have plenty to do.”