Max Verstappen offered a blunt response when asked if his crash into George Russell was deliberate at the Spanish Grand Prix. The Red Bull man was handed a 10-second penalty for his role in the collision, dropping from P4 to P10 after feeling aggrieved by a decision made by his own team.
The Dutchman was told over his team radio to give a position back to Russell following a previous incident, which Verstappen disagreed with, before making contact with the Brit on Turn 4. When asked by Sky Sports F1 on the matter, Verstappen did not want to discuss it further but did not deny intentionally driving into Russell, only asking: “Does it matter?”
When pushed for more of a response on the incident by interviewer Rachel Brooks, Verstappen continued: “Yeah, OK. That’s great. I prefer to speak about the race rather than one single moment.”
He was told that the punishment puts a serious dent in his championship chances, only to reply: “If there are any. I think we are way too slow to fight for the title. That was clear again today. We tried to do a three-stop and that was quite good but we also needed it because we had quite a bit of degradation on the tyres.
“Unfortunately, the Safety Car came out at the end and we ran out of tyres to use and the hard tyre was not the right tyre. When you only have six laps to go, everyone can go flat out, and you are severely grip-limited on the hard.”
Russell said that he thought the manoeuvre was deliberate while driving the car, but stopped short of calling for Verstappen to be disqualified, after Nico Rosberg on commentary wanted a black flag to be brought out.
“I was as surprised as you guys were,” he said. “I’ve seen those sort of manoeuvres before on simulator games and go-karting but never in F1. Ultimately we came home in P4 and he came home in P10. I don’t really know what was going through his mind. It felt deliberate in the moment, so it felt surprising.
“It’s not my place to say [if Verstappen should have been DQ’d]. Right now, I’m not going to give it any thought because we have our own problems to deal with.
“We are trying to make our car go faster. The Safety Car at the end shuffled things up. It’s down to the stewards to decide if it was deliberate or not.
“Max is such an amazing driver and so many people look up to him. It’s just a shame something like that continues to occur. It seems totally unnecessary and never seems to benefit himself.”
Oscar Piastri crossed the chequered flag in first place, opening up a 10-point lead over McLaren team-mate Lando Norris at the top of the Drivers’ Championship. Verstappen now sits 49 points behind the race winner in Barcelona.
