Max Verstappen was left unimpressed after colliding with Lewis Hamilton late on at the Hungarian GP, expressing his frustration for getting “shit thrown” at him for moving under braking at the Austrian GP, as he felt Hamilton did the same in the late stages in Budapest.
The Dutchman was already frustrated with the strategy that he was given in Sunday’s grand prix, which left him exposed to an undercut from the Mercedes driver two times in a row, and both times he couldn’t get ahead of the seven-time world champion, although the second encounter proved more dramatic, as the pair collided sending the Red Bull up in the air momentarily.
The reigning world champion said he was trying to avoid a collision as Hamilton kept coming towards him in the braking zone – and pointed out he was heavily criticised for doing the same with Lando Norris just a few races ago:
“I got a lot of shit thrown at me in Austria where people say I’m moving on the braking, blah, blah, blah. I’m positioning my car in the initial movement and then I keep it straight.
“But today, under braking, he just kept turning to the right, and that’s why I also locked up, because I was, of course, going for the move, but I see the car on the outside just keeps coming at me.
“And otherwise, we would have crashed already before, but I had to stop the car and that’s why I had to lock up.”
Aside from the flashpoint with his long-standing rival which cost him a shot at the podium – and he is under investigation for causing a collision – the race was already going from bad to worse for Verstappen, as continuous frustration with an unbalanced car and poor strategy meant he poured his frustration very clearly over the radio to race engineer GianPiero Lambiase, who at one point even went as far as calling Max’s attitude over the radio “childish”.
When asked about his outbursts in the radio waves, Verstappen was unmoved, saying it was “nothing crazy”, and dismissed criticisms of his attitude saying “they can all fuck off”.
“I’ve heard it before. It’s nothing crazy,” he said of his radio anger. “I don’t agree with that [that it was worse than usual], but I was just annoyed, of course, with today.
“And maybe the team at the time didn’t realise, I think, what they did wrong or they maybe didn’t see it was so severe. But, of course, in the car you have also different feelings.
“I’ve been annoyed before. Sometimes you press in the radio to voice your opinion and that’s what I did today. I’m hoping that maybe the second pit stop would be a better call, but it wasn’t.
“But for me, that is not distracting when I’m driving. Of course, I’m annoyed, but you also then focus back on what you have to do and that’s, of course, control the car.”
When asked if the lack of pace and uncharacteristic balance problems of his RB20 or the strategy blunders were the main source of his frustration, the three-time world champion didn’t hold back in his criticism of the strategy team, saying that they couldn’t even salvage the next best result which was a P3:
“I already said yesterday that maybe some people are not on the same wavelength with [the severity of the problems]. Yeah, it’s as severe as it [looks].
“I mean, of course, we didn’t have the pace to fight McLaren today, but then I think we could still have had a P3. But our wrong strategy calls put me on the back foot where I constantly had to fight people, try to overtake, but it didn’t work today.
“The track is really hot, [and] as soon as you get close to cars, the tyres overheat and basically all the advantage you have with the tyres is not working anymore.
“The strategy today [annoyed me more]. The car, I knew, of course, it was already going to be a difficult race, that beating McLaren would be tough. But then you at least need to get a P3 over the line – and even that we couldn’t do.
“I don’t know, I have to speak to the team about why and how. Maybe they didn’t realise that following [other cars] was so hard today.”
