Verstappen hits back at Russell: “I have lost all respect for him”

Max Verstappen took a one-place penalty for allegedly disrupting Russell on a qualifying cool-down lap out of the corner. He overtook the Mercedes early on and regained the lead. But it will take a lot longer for the two drivers to maintain any sort of cordial relationship given the Dutchman’s reaction to his penalty on Saturday.

After his Qatar GP win, he took aim at Russell: “I was quite surprised when sitting there in the stewards’ room about what was all going on. Honestly, it was very disappointing because I think we’re all here, we respect each other a lot and of course, I’ve been in that meeting room many times in my life, in my career, with people that I’ve raced and I’ve never seen someone trying to screw someone over that hard. And that, for me… I’ve lost all respect.”

Russell’s role in Verstappen’s penalty

It was a controversial penalty because he was punished for impeding the passage of a driver who was not on a fast lap, something that is never penalized; claiming that he drove “unnecessarily slow”, something that is frequently done in warm-up or cool-down laps and which until now had never resulted in penalties. Among the reactions of other drivers, Alonso himself joked: “In Abu Dhabi I will push on slow laps behind other drivers so that they are penalized…”

“I couldn’t believe that I got it," Verstappen added. “But in a way, I was also like, yeah, I’m not surprised anymore in the world that I live in. You’re not happy with it, but at one point also you have to just turn the page. But, yeah, it wasn’t very enjoyable to see that happen, because I think that’s the first time that in a slow lap someone has been penalised, while, actually, I just tried to be nice, so maybe I shouldn’t be nice.

“But the thing is that, because at the end of the season, everything is more or less decided, for me especially, I didn’t want to screw anyone over to prepare their lap. And by doing that, being nice, basically you get a penalty. That’s what I tried to explain as well, but I just felt like I was talking to a brick wall, so there’s not much that was possible for whatever reason.

“I think I really spoke about valid reasons of what happened and it was clear-cut that around me there were different scenarios going on as well, with people having colder tyres and stuff, so they had to push anyway and I didn’t want to then cause a scene into a last corner and then no one had a lap, so very, very surprising,” he concluded.