Max Verstappen vows to ease up on the aggression in F1 title fight with Lewis Hamilton

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Max Verstappen has pledged to dial down his all-out aggression in his quest to dethrone Lewis Hamilton as world champion.

And the 23-year-old warned he cannot afford a single mistake in a bid to halt Hamilton’s record-breaking eighth drivers’ crown.

Hamilton and Verstappen look set for a season-long head to head after swapping a win apiece in the opening two grands prix of the season.

And ahead of round three, this weekend’s Portuguese Grand Prix, Verstappen said: “It’s just choosing your moments when to shine. You have to understand that if it’s not your day, it’s not your day and you have to settle for a certain result, whereas in the past sometimes we had a car where we could win races but we knew we were not in a championship fight so you might risk it a bit more.

“When you are in a championship fight… your approach does change a little bit because you cannot afford to drop too many points in a weekend where you are not at your top level. We have to make sure that, even if we don’t have a perfect weekend, we still score a lot of points.”

Verstappen has looked a more than capable title rival to Hamilton already in 2021 but admitted he could not afford the slip-ups of the past.

“You can’t really make a mistake especially in a championship so far which is so close,” he said. “I don’t want, though, to put any unnecessary pressure on anyone in the team because we know what we have to do and there is no point in keeping saying that. We just want to focus on this weekend and I prefer to remain quite silent. I don’t need to hype anything up.

Hamilton, meanwhile, has pledged to join in with the sport social media blackout over the course of the grand prix weekend in a response to the lack of action by social media companies over discriminatory abuse. And the seven-time world champion also hinted he plans to agree a new deal and stay with Mercedes for the 2022 season.

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