F1 2020: Max Verstappen defends Red Bull radio blow up in Spanish Grand Prix
Formula 1 star Max Verstappen has moved to defend his furious radio tirade at his own team after his instructions were swatted away.
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Red Bull star Max Verstappen has moved to explain his furious radio blow up at his own team as he suffered a moment of helplessness in the Spanish Grand Prix.
The Dutch driver blew up in a series of barbs directed at his Red Bull engineer as he began to lose touch with Mercedes champion Lewis Hamilton at the end of his first run on soft compound tyres.
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Verstappen dropped to more than eight seconds behind Hamilton after jumping Valtteri Bottas in the run into turn one.
The 22-year-old angrily barked at his team that he should be brought into the pits to change his deteriorating tyres.
“Struggling with rear. Turn Seven is horrible now,” he said of his fading rubber.
“Tailwind? I don’t care. The tyres have nothing left.
“Do you want me to repeat it again? The f***ing tyres are dead.”
“I’m losing so much time. Who cares if I’m put in traffic, I’ll easily pass them.”
He continued to vent his frustration at his own team later in the race.
“How about we just focus on our race first instead of looking to Lewis? Clearly on the soft tyre we were not as fast as them,” he said.
“So let’s do our job, and let them do their job.”
Verstappen stood by his comments after finishing second in between the two Mercedes stars. He finished more than 24 seconds behind Hamilton.
“At the end of the day you can’t control what they’re doing,” Verstappen said.
“The only thing you can control is what we do. So we just have to make sure that we did the fastest strategy possible for us.
“I wanted to pit, and they didn’t call me in, so I was massively struggling on the tyres. I lost quite a bit of lap time over the last two laps.
“I already said on the radio, I don’t care if you pit me behind the Racing Points because I would pass them easily anyway because we are faster, especially on new tyres. That was the conversation.”
Red Bull boss Christian Horner also said he had no problems with Verstappen’s radio messages.
“He obviously doesn’t have the visibility of the whole picture the strategists have,” Horner told skysports.com.
“He’s ambitious, he’s competitive, and he’s pushing.
“You can hear that his engineer is fairly clear with him, in terms of his instruction of what his job is and what the rest of the engineering team are up to.
“What we didn’t want to do [after the first stop] was drop him back into traffic which would burn up the tyres.”
The team principal went on to explain the team all but accepted its best chance was to try to hold off Bottas rather than risk everything to chase Hamilton’s tail.
“Our race wasn’t about Lewis today, it was about keeping Valtteri behind us,” said Horner. “Max got everything he can out of the car and to split Mercedes who had a quicker car than us today, I don’t think we could have got more than that.
“That was all that was there.”
Originally published as F1 2020: Max Verstappen defends Red Bull radio blow up in Spanish Grand Prix