by Christian Horner knows that Max Verstappen is impressed against a “very rounded” competitor in Oscar Piatri, but is funded by Red Bull’s performance in Saudi Arabia.
Verstappen started on the pole, but received a penalty of five seconds for cutting the corner to stay in front of Piatri in turn 1 so that the Australian was able to take the lead on the pit stops.
He drove with a comfortable victory and took over the leadership of the driver’s championship for the first time in his career and overtook the teammate Lando Norris.
Verstappen Red Bull Future had dominated after a hard weekend in Bahrain before the race in Jeddah, but he delivered a breathtaking pole round and showed a strong pace.
Horner knows that Piatri, who is now leading Norris with Verstappen two further, leads to 10 points, is a hard opposition for the four -time world champion.
“I think he is very strong, mentally very strong, pace. He looks very rounded,” said Horner about Piatri.
“Oscar has won three races to Lando’s One. At that moment he looks like the driver in shape.
“He is now the leader of the championship. Max would have led the championship, so things move pretty quickly.
“There are a lot of positive things that we can lose weight from the weekend. The frustrating, I thought we had hit her today, and unfortunately a really marginal call was the difference in the first harassment.
“That was probably our competitive race of the year in relation to the raw pace.”
Piatri won one after the other and now has three of the first five races and was the first Australian to lead the championship since Mark Webber in 2010.
The unshakable 24-year-old delivered another error-free weekend, while Norris, who took fourth place, paid the price for the 10th time after falling from the final qualifying.
Piatri completed a breathtaking overhaul on Lewis Hamilton with his outdoor round after the magnifying glass and went off to pull himself out of Ferrari.
Andrea Stella, director of McLaren Team, said that at that moment he was not worried about his driver about his driver.
“Personally, I didn’t have an exciting moment there. He was very confident, he was very easy to control the situation and he knew that Corner One was his chance,” said Stella.
“Today was Baku (last season). In Baku it was very tense when they remember (Charles) Leclerc, but somehow I was very quiet because it is one of those in which they know that Oscar has control and he knows very well what he is doing.”
