“Then again they leave me out [in the second round of stops] where I basically immediately got into traffic with backmarkers. And on a day where the car’s not the quickest, you need to try and capitalise on undercuts… You can’t rely on a little pace advantage.

“Maybe last year, yeah, with the car being quite a lot faster than everyone else. But I think in the position that we’re in now, we can’t do that anymore and I think that’s why today was a tough race for us.

“Naturally of course that frustrates me because I want things to be done better because of course I’m realistic – today, we couldn’t have beaten the McLarens but a P3 I think was on the cards if we would have just been on it a bit more.”

READ MORE: Piastri admits McLaren team orders made him ‘a bit nervous’ as he reflects on ‘very special’ maiden win in Hungary

Asked what changes needed to be enacted at Red Bull, meanwhile, Verstappen replied: “We need to work. I mean, it’s not like suddenly next weekend [in Spa] we can have new upgrades on the car, so yeah, it is a problem.

“We know that we’re lacking compared to McLaren and it’s of course not nice, but we have to analyse our stuff, how we can improve our overall package currently. But I don’t think that’s something very easily done, you know? We’ll see next week how it will evolve, but at the moment, I think race pace, qualifying pace – we are behind [McLaren].”