Pastor Maldonado admits that the spectacular moment he had on the pit straight while chasing Max Verstappen in Austria was “scary” - and insists that it was triggered by a loss of downforce as his DRS was open.
The Lotus driver got crossed up when behind Verstappen, but he managed to hang on to the car and went on to finish ahead of the Dutchman in seventh place.
“For sure it was a bit scary,” said Maldonado. “It was before the braking point, so I managed to recover the car in the best way. I had the DRS open, and because of the DRS, I lost the car.
“It was difficult. Following a car here is always tricky, it's a fast track, and it's very easy to lose control of the car. I was trying to do my best, I was quicker than him, he was making a lot of mistakes. I was just following and waiting for the right moment.”
Maldonado's race was made harder by a problem off the line at the start, which him cost several positions.
“I nearly stalled, the anti-stall came in. I think it was a clutch issue. We were not able to do practice starts at the end of the pitlane, and on Saturday it was raining, and I think because of that we had a problem. I lost three places and they were very tough to recover. That compromised a little bit our final result, because from the strategy point of view we were looking at P5 or P6. That was possible. Our pace indicated that the possibility was there, but we recovered quite well.”
After a disastrous start to the season, the Venezuelan has now finished seventh in the last two races.
“It's good points for the team, good points for me. I hope to continue like this. I think we can be ahead of Force India, for sure. This race it happened what happened, but we've been quite solid through the weekend, apart from Q2, I just missed it in the last corner and I lost time. We just need to keep pushing, keep focused, and the team is very happy.”
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