MONZA, Italy (Reuters) -Max Verstappen reckoned his once-dominant Red Bull team had taken another step towards getting back to their form of old with victory at Monza on Sunday.
Even if a fifth successive Formula One title now looks well out of his reach, the Dutch driver won the Italian Grand Prix by more than 19 seconds -- qualifying with the sport's fastest ever lap and following up with the fastest race in history.
The victory ended a run of eight races without a win and followed on from second place at home in Zandvoort the weekend before, leaving Verstappen 94 points adrift of McLaren's championship leader Oscar Piastri with eight rounds remaining.
With three Saturday sprints also still to come, there are a maximum of 224 points still to be won.
"It just seems like this weekend has been another step forward with the behaviour of the car and that also then shows in the race," Verstappen told reporters.
"Of course, McLaren stayed out to try and gamble for the safety car, and I think that's why the gap is a little bit bigger than it should have been. But still for us, an incredible weekend."
Verstappen said some previous races had made him feel like a passenger in the car but now there was more balance and the tyres were behaving more normally, although some of it was track-dependent.
"Up until now we've had a lot of races where we were just shooting left and right a little bit with the set-up of the car. Quite extreme changes, which shows that we were not in control," he added.
"We were not fully understanding what to do."
Verstappen said the arrival of Laurent Mekies, who comes from an engineering background, as team principal after Christian Horner was dismissed in July had helped.
The win was the team's first of the post-Horner era.
"He's asking the right questions to the engineers -- common-sense questions --so I think that works really well," he explained.
"Plus, you try to understand from the things that you have tried, that at one point some things give you a bit of an idea of a direction, and that's what we kept on working on.
"I definitely felt that in Zandvoort already we took a step that seemed to work quite well, and then here another step which felt again a little bit better."
Verstappen won nine races last year, after a record 19 of 22 in 2023, but Sunday was only his third of a current campaign in which McLaren have so far won 12.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
