Verstappen: Hamilton had more to lose

Max Verstappen says he took extra risk to overtake Lewis Hamilton and win the Malaysia Grand Prix as the championship leader had more to lose.

Hamilton started from pole position and led away in the opening lap with a clear advantage over Verstappen after Kimi Raikkonen failed to start alongside him on the front row. However, Verstappen closed the gap and was able to get down the inside of Hamilton into the first corner at the start of lap four, going on to take a dominant second grand prix victory.

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"I had a good run out of the last corner," Verstappen said when talking through the race-winning move. "Then I opted to go to the inside. Of course I know that Lewis has more to lose because he's fighting for the championship so maybe I took a bit of extra risk because of it.

"But it was my only chance I think because that was one of the laps I could see he was clipping more than I was so I used the battery I had and I got past."

"Once I got past Lewis I could basically just focus on my pace and look after the tires and when I needed to speed up I had the pace to do it. So, that was very pleasing. I think it's the first time I've had that in my career so far and I've won. So, to do something like that was, of course, great.

"The car had a great balance in the second sector and I just had to stay very focused because with the backmarkers you could easily lose a lot of lap time so you had to be focused on that. Almost got taken out in Turn 1 when I passed two backmarkers but from there onwards I could control everything, so of course very happy with that."

Revealing he "was not feeling too well" for the whole race weekend, Verstappen also pointed to Raikkonen's absence as a contributing factor to his victory.

"It's always easier [without Raikkonen], it's one competitor less. If you look at the performance of Sebastian [Vettel], for sure they would have been really strong. It's of course a bit of a gift in that way, that it's one less competitor, but we never know how quick he was in the race."