Verstappen took his 10th win of the season at Zandvoort on Sunday after passing Lewis Hamilton on the final safety car restart on fresh tyres.
Mercedes managed to put Hamilton and team-mate George Russell in contention after opting for a one-stop strategy and showing good pace on both medium and hard tyres.
Had it not been for a virtual safety car period, Verstappen would have sat third after his final pit stop and would have had to overtake the two Mercedes cars to win the race, only for the VSC to force Hamilton and Russell to make additional stops.
“I was just surprised they were so quick on the hardest compounds,” Verstappen said of Mercedes.
“I must say that these tires are very stiff, the C1 and C2. And they just didn’t really seem to light up for us as well as they did for them.
“I think that’s what made it a bit more complicated for us. But once we were able to get back to soft, we were able to counter it.
“But yes, I was probably expecting [Mercedes] be a bit slower. And I expected Ferrari to be a little faster.
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Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB18, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W13
Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool
Zandvoort marked a big turnaround for Mercedes after struggling to challenge Red Bull or Ferrari at Spa a week earlier, where the team struggled with the high-speed nature of the circuit.
Russell eventually finished second at Zandvoort, scoring his best result of the season so far, while Hamilton moved from first to fourth in the final stint after Mercedes opted to keep him under the final safety car.
Verstappen realized that Mercedes was becoming a growing threat in racing when he switched from softs to mediums, only to see that the silver cars “still got good lap times”.
“As soon as they switched to hard I was very interested to see their pace because I never really wanted to switch to a hard tyre,” Verstappen said.
“But yeah, when I heard the lap times I was like ‘that’s pretty quick’. And I was trying to push a bit. But they were still a few tenths quicker.
“[It’s] very surprising that they made it work, it’s tiring here. But then I knew, of course, that the end of the race might be approaching, with the way our strategies were unfolding.
“The gap after the VSC was still big enough to manage. But clearly they were fast in the race.
