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“PEOPLE have been bullied by Max for years now.”
“George is a backstabber. That he brings all this stuff up. He’s just a loser.”
“Max has been enabled because nobody’s stood up to him. He cannot deal with adversity, he slams his whole team and loses the plot.”
“George lies and pastes all kinds of things together that aren’t true.”
In terms of the power of the language employed, the dispute between George Russell and Max Verstappen that blew up last week is already right up there on the list of all-time great feuds between Formula 1 drivers. On Thursday evening last week, both attended the traditional annual dinner the drivers share in Abu Dhabi.
Russell was last to turn up. There were two seats left, both next to Verstappen, who waved and said “Hi, George” and indicated for him to sit down.
Russell said hello but, in what must have been an awkward moment, then took one of the seats and moved it away to sit next to team-mate Lewis Hamilton.
It might have been a misjudgement. Had Russell sat down with Verstappen, they would probably have sorted it all out within a couple of minutes. But these two have a history.
After a crash during the sprint race in Azerbaijan in 2022, Verstappen called Russell “Princess George” in a spat the Briton called “a little bit pathetic”. It has lain dormant in the intervening two years, much of which were characterised by domination by Verstappen and his Red Bull team.
But at the end of a 2024 season in which the field has closed up, and the competition has escalated between all four top teams and their drivers, all it took was one relatively small incident for it all to blow up.
And now, after what they have said, it might be a while before they play together at padel — the F1 drivers’ current sporting pastime of choice — which they have been doing this year regularly with Lando Norris, Alex Albon and sometimes Carlos Sainz.
Verstappen started all this, in public at least, after winning last weekend’s Qatar Grand Prix.
He said he had “lost all respect” for Russell, adding: “I have never seen someone trying to mess someone over that hard.”
The Dutchman’s comments were a reference to his perception of Russell’s actions in the stewards’ room in Qatar, at a hearing that led to the Red Bull driver being given a one-place grid penalty and being demoted from pole position to second place behind Russell’s Mercedes. Verstappen had been called to the stewards for driving unnecessarily slowly, and Russell, as the driver who had been impeded, went, too.
They had qualified one-two for the grand prix, with Verstappen ahead of Russell. Verstappen had broken the rule defining the speed drivers are not allowed to dip below on a slow lap in qualifying.
But what happened in the stewards’ room incensed Verstappen, who felt Russell had gone overboard in stating his case in a bid to earn his rival a penalty.
Russell, who had been fastest on the first runs in final qualifying, felt the incident had cost him pole position.
They exchanged words outside the stewards’ room after the hearing, when Russell claims Verstappen threatened to “purposefully go out of his way to crash into me and ‘put me on my head in the wall’”.
Their second argument was witnessed by Sainz, Norris and Verstappen’s team-mate Sergio Perez.
Because of the timings of the post-race interviews in Qatar, Thursday — media day at the season finale in Abu Dhabi — was Russell’s first chance to address Verstappen’s comments.
“It’s funny,” he said, “because even before I said a word in the stewards, he was swearing at the stewards.
“He was so angry before I had even spoken. There is nothing to lie about. He was going too slow. He was on the racing line and in the high-speed corner. I wasn’t trying to get him a penalty. I was just trying to prepare my lap.”
For Verstappen, this incident came at the end of a long, hard season which has been his most impressive on a number of different levels. He won the championship with two races remaining despite having a car that was fastest only for the first five grands prix, and he did it by driving with a consistent excellence that no one was able to match. Everyone in F1 — including Russell — acknowledges that.
At the same time, Verstappen has been holding together a team that at times has looked like it was falling apart at the seams.
Max has also faced the resignation of the greatest designer in F1 history, Adrian Newey, a senior figure with whom he has worked closely for nearly a decade.
And to many of his fellow drivers, Verstappen can drive in extremis in a manner they do not find acceptable. — BBC
Online Reporter