"You have difficult moments and setbacks and you learn from it" - Max Verstappen on turning mistakes into lessons

Max Verstappen feels it is important to learn from mistakes and errors and grow from setbacks and difficulties after a turbulent start to the 2022 F1 season.

Speaking in a video for Red Bull's sponsor, Bybit, Max Verstappen elaborated on the challenges the team has faced so far and how they can overcome it. He said:

"I think it's a constant progression of working together with the team around you. You get more and more experience of the situations you have been in. Of course, it is never one straight lineup, you have difficult moments and setbacks and you learn from it and I think, at the end of the day, you need to make mistakes or have setbacks to ultimately become a better individual."

The 24-year-old elaborated on how he finds the will to keep improving on a personal level. Verstappen further added:

"It's just about trying to be better by doing little things. There is not one particular aspect where I think I can do a lot better, it is just about keeping learning and having that motivation to learn because standing still is basically going backwards. It's all about the attention to detail as well to try and keep learning and just become a little bit better in all different kinds of areas."

The reigning world champion has only one race finish to his name in the opening three rounds of the campaign. Both of Verstappen's DNFs came with the Dutchman running in P2 in Bahrain and Australia. What could have been a manageable gap of 10 points to championship leader Charles Leclerc is now a 46-point chasm instead.

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"There is no reason to believe" - Max Verstappen not harboring hopes of title repeat after Australian GP DNF

Max Verstappen has admitted he is not thinking about his title defense after a his second DNF in three races at the 2022 F1 Australian GP.

With a slew of reliability issues plus the excess weight of the RB18 making life uneasy for Verstappen, he took a realistic approach in an interview with autosport.com, saying:

“Being already so far down in the championship, I think it’s 46 points, from now on we need to be ahead. We need to be quicker, which we are not at the moment. And we need to be reliable, which we are also not. So there’s a lot of things to work on. I don’t even think about it. At the moment, there is no reason to believe in it.”

The Dutchman will be hoping to bounce back at the next race of the season, the 2022 F1 Imola GP this weekend.