Verstappen: Budapest will be a bit more of a struggle for us

Ferrari and Charles Leclerc have been making the Dutchman's life a bit easier as they continuously trip over with team errors, reliability problems, as well as driver error, which was the case at Paul Ricard.

The reigning F1 Champion now finds himself a healthy 63 points ahead of Leclerc in the Championship, but he is not finding any comfort in that.

Quoted by F1's Official Website, he said: "Of course, it’s a great lead but a lot of things can happen and I just want to stay focused; we need a lot more good results, a lot more one-lap pace.

"The next race is Budapest, and I think that will be a bit more of a struggle for us, where I think Ferrari is going to be really, really quick," Verstappen predicted. "It’s all about scoring points every single race, even when it’s not your race."

Ferrari have been strong in qualifying this year, evident from Leclerc's seven poles so far this season, while Red Bull have had the better race car.

"From our side, we know that we have to find, especially over one lap, quite a bit of performance," Verstappen pointed out. "We’ll be working on it.

"It’s still important to always score points, even on a bad day, which we had in Austria," he insisted. "Of course, the lead we have is great, but it’s probably a bit bigger than what it should have been when you look at the car performances between the two cars.

Verstappen chased Leclerc hard at the start of the race at Le Castellet last Sunday, but could not pass him on trick, going for an undercut, which turned out to be unnecessary as the latter crashed out.

Of that battle he said: "I thought he would be faster. I thought it would be very hard to follow [Leclerc], but immediately I could see that our balance was not bad.

“It looked like we were very competitive and that is of course what we like to see," the Red Bull ace admitted.

"They [Ferrari] probably of course learned quite a lot, but I think also you know people are also bringing upgrades and sometimes that also helps tyre degradation," he went on.

"Today, even with them sliding a bit, they were still very quick in front of us. It just shows that they have a very quick car," Verstappen maintained.

The next race, the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix, will be this weekend in Budapest at a track that is expected to favor Ferrari with a number of slow corners where theF1-75 excels, which will be a challenge for Red Bull; if the Reds keep it together of course.

Mattia Binotto already said that the target for Hungary would be a one-two for the team.