Max Verstappen was enjoying being in the lead at the Silverstone circuit today after getting a good start from second place on the grid and overtaking pole sitter Carlos Sainz after the Ferrari driver made a small mistake, which allowed the Dutchman through. However, only a handful of laps later the Red Bull driver started to lose pace and drop back through the field after running over a piece of debris, something he thought was a puncture to his rear tyre. He was then forced to pit to rectify the problem, but upon returning to the circuit, the problem was still there. He told the team over the radio that he felt the car was broken, and they replied that there was damage at the rear and he would lose performance as a result, but the car was still safe to drive. "It felt like a puncture because suddenly I had no balance a lot of oversteer like the car was hopping a lot," he explained. "So then we decided to box but even after that the car was a handful to drive."
'I could not drastically move left or right'
At the end of the race, after finishing in seventh place, he examined underneath the car and saw that the left-hand side of the floor was completely gone. "When I jumped out of the car, I had a look under the floor and the whole left hand side underneath was completely ruptured, everything was gone. "Once I got into the lead after Carlos made a mistake, a few laps later, in turn five, there was a piece of carbon, but by the time I got there, it was on the racing line and I could not drastically move left or right. "So, I tried to just hit it head on. But instead, it went into the floor and it just destroyed everything. "It was very, very tough,[the race] but in the end, seventh place was still a good result with the damage I had, for the championship."
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