A younger Verstappen could have spat out his dummy

Verstappen slid to sixth place due to changing circumstances, a position he felt he would have to settle with until George Russell retired and McLaren made pit wall mistakes, leaving him pursuing Hamilton late on for the win.

Verstappen fell barely 1.5s short of overtaking Hamilton on hard tyres, but was content to settle for second, extending his drivers’ championship advantage over Norris and the pursuing pack.

Verstappen drove calmly and measuredly, knowing how far he could push his car, which is no longer the fastest in Formula One.

“It’s accepting what you have on any given day, and that’s maturity, that’s experience,” said former McLaren and Red Bull driver David Coulthard. “He has won almost 60 Grands Prix.

“It’s exactly what we saw with Lewis out front, and he’s won over 100 grand prix. A race like this is all about the long game, as there are so many possibilities.

“Maybe a younger Max might have spat the dummy and over-driven but he doesn’t need to do that now.”

Verstappen, according to Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, had “a very strange race” due to swings in performance among the frontrunners, which must be analysed ahead of the final two races before F1’s summer break in Hungary and Belgium.

“On the medium tyre at the start of the race you would have to say that it looked like Mercedes had the pace, had things under control, and they seemed to have McLaren covered,” explained Horner.

“We were just dropping off the back of it, first being overtaken by Lando and then by Piastri, and at some time, Carlos Sainz was beginning to shut down.

“I then felt we got the call onto the intercom bang on, with a really fantastic out lap by Max. He was five seconds faster in the middle sector, putting him ahead of Russell and Piastri, who they [McLaren] held out for another lap.

“But for the next three or four laps, we went nowhere. It felt like the extra lap we had taken out of the tyre had injured us, but then it calmed down.

“As the circuit began to return to slicks, Max was once again the fastest vehicle on the track, and he was catching up to Mercedes and McLaren. That was headed our way.

“Then [we had] a wonderful stop and a good call to go on to the hard tyre, and Max’s pace thereafter, he was half a second per lap faster in the middle sector, and he just kept coming back, passing Lando. Another lap or two and he might have passed Lewis.

“There is a lot of data and information to be extracted from that to understand these large changes because different automobiles appeared to be faster at different periods in time.

“It started off with Mercedes, then suddenly it looked like McLaren had everything under control, and then suddenly, the second half of the race, Max started coming back and very nearly won it.”