FORMULA ONE
Why did Max Verstappen threaten to leave the Formula One Championship?
Three-time consecutive world champion threatened to leave Formula 1 because of the recent penalty he earned “for swearing” at the Singapore Grand Prix.
The Dutchman is dissatisfied after the latest FIA penalty, calling it ridiculous and saying he is tired of everything.
In the race itself, he was second behind Norris. He currently has 52 points more than the Briton in the fight for the championship title. Verstappen was sentenced to community service after he described his car with some indecent words in the press conference before the race in Singapore.
Max completed the community service sentence with the stewards before the race. He skipped the last press conference, gave brief answers, and then had a separate conversation with journalists in the F1 paddock to answer questions. That’s where he expressed his dissatisfaction with the treatment and the echoing it produced.
“These kinds of things definitely decide my future as well, when you can’t be yourself or you have to deal with these kinds of silly things.
Now, I am at the stage of my career where you don’t want to be dealing with this all the time. It’s really tiring. For me, that is not a way of continuing in the sport, that’s for sure.”
The FIA president, Mohamed Ben Sulayem, said on the eve of the weekend that he does not want the driver to swear and that he will not tolerate “rapper vocabulary.” which made a lot of controversy afterward.
His biggest rival, Lewis Hamilton, took Verstappen’s side. “With what he said, I don’t like how he’s expressed it. Saying ‘rappers’ is very stereotypical as most rappers are black. It really kind of points towards ‘we are not like them’, so I think those were the wrong choice of words and there’s a racial element there,” said the seven-time world champion.