Verstappen believes Red Bull car, reliability will improve in 2018

After a somewhat disappointing 2017, Max Verstappen has said he has faith his Red Bull car will be immediately better in 2018 and aims to be fighting for the Formula 1 world championship.

Despite problems this year Verstappen believed Red Bull had the best car on the F1 grid and could fight for a championship but was let down by reliability issues during the opening rounds of the 2017 campaign which saw him lose pace with the leaders in the championship.

“The whole package is still not the best but what is the most important for me personally is the car,” Verstappen said. “Everybody can win championships of course when you have a very powerful engine but I hope that especially also now the upcoming two years that it will be at least a bit closer than even when we are a few horsepower down we can win races.”

Verstappen also feels Red Bull’s chassis can compensate for a "20 or 30" horsepower deficit, which he claimed Red Bull had done to win championships before, while its slow development this year would not happen again in 2018.

“We learned from our mistakes so hopefully we will have a better car at the beginning of the year, which I any way think we will do because the rules are not really changing,” he said. “It is not that from one to the other season you are going to gain a massive amount of downforce, but we should be alright.

Verstappen has suffered consistent reliability issues, retiring seven times in eighteen races, but says there was nothing he could have done to change that.

“Daniel has also had problems lately. If we could control it, then it would have been better, but as you can see it can happen on either side of the garage.

“It seemed like in the beginning of the year Daniel was good in that, but it has nothing to do with the driver.

“Of course the season in general is still not how it should have been because I am catching up a lot now but I lost a lot of points. I am not happy in that way, that I am still sixth in championship. On the other hand it does not really matter if you are second or sixth, it is not first.”