Max Verstappen plays down Lewis Hamilton success as Brit on verge of equaling Schumacher

But Verstappen feels there is still a huge gap for his team to close if they want to challenge for silverware.

“There are quite a few things at the moment,” he explained. “First of all we are always too slow at the beginning [of the season], so we need to make sure we have a car that hits the ground running and is a lot more competitive.

“How to do that? Clearly we haven’t found it, so we need to change our approach. We need to find a different way of working.

“In terms of operations, we are good: we have really good pitstops, we’re good at strategy. I don’t think there are a lot of things that go wrong there.