Que Verstappen nunca foi flor que se cheire já se sabia. Ser bom pode desculpar muita coisa, mas não desculpa a falta de caracter.
Se de facto foram essas as palavras dele relativamente ao que ia fazer ao Russel, deixa uma imagem de infantilidade que não se entende. Dá também para entender muitas da comunicações rádio e entrevistas pós corridas em que não ganhou, em que a culpa é sempre da equipa e nunca dele.
“He said, ‘I don’t know why you would want to screw me like this, I’m so disappointed in you. I was going to not even race you tomorrow, I was going to let you by, but now if I have to, I will purposely go out of my way to put you on your f****** head in the wall.’ So I don’t understand why he was so unnecessarily aggressive and violent in that regard.
“But we’ve got a guy who’s on the top of this sport who feels he’s above the law, and I don’t think that’s right.
“I admire his on-track battles, and when he’s hard and aggressive. But what we saw in the end of the season in ’21 or what we saw in Mexico with Lando, they weren’t hard, aggressive maneuvers. They were ‘do or die. I’m willing to take this guy out’. Which I don’t think is the way we should go racing.
“I honestly just want to set the record straight, to be honest. Because it’s just a total double standard that he has for the regulations, and just thinking that he is above everybody else.
“So it’s not me trying to assert my leadership style or anything. It’s just somebody has come out and said that I’m a two-faced motherf****r, and he’s entitled to his own opinions. But coming out and saying that publicly, and slamming me publicly, I’m just not going to accept it, and I’m going to tell people what the reality was.
“He pushes himself to the absolute limit week in, week out, and in 95 percent of the scenarios, that is incredible to see, and I respect him for that 95 percent. But there have been incidents that have gone unpunished. Maybe that is why he thinks he can get away with murder. But that is not the world we live in, and actions have consequences.”
“It can’t just keep going on like that. For me, it’s interesting, this whole regard with him and his own team,” he said. “They’re doing their utmost to get [Christian] Horner out of Red Bull, but at the very first race that he wasn’t competitive, he was absolutely slamming his team, and I know for a fact the week after, a quarter of his engineering team were sending their CVs to Mercedes, to McLaren, to Aston.
“So I don’t respect somebody who doesn’t appreciate those who have given him the chance to perform, because these last 12 races, he has had a car that is of normal competitiveness, and he’s been in the fight the same way as myself, Lewis (Hamilton), Charles (Leclerc), Carlos (Sainz), Lando and (Oscar) Piastri have been. And that’s how it should be.
“I feel like we all need to lead by example here. He’s the biggest, most successful guy in the sport for the last couple of years. He can do what he wants in his own business, but when he starts throwing comments around like he did on Sunday night about me, I’m not just going to sit there and accept it.”
I just don't know why other drivers have when they've been in this battle with him, just sort of made it so easy and just let it be.
Lewis is a world champion who I aspire to be like, and I think he is a gold standard of a role model that younger kids should be looking up to. And the way Lewis dealt with that championship fight, he was hard, he was aggressive, he was always respectful, and he never went beyond the line.
You can go beyond the line in making a slight misjudgement, but going out of your way to say you will purposefully crash into somebody and put them on their head is beyond the line.
“People have been bullied by Max for years now, and you can’t question his driving abilities. But he cannot deal with adversity. Whenever anything has gone against him — Jeddah ’21, Brazil ’21 — he lashes out. Budapest this year, the very first race the car wasn’t dominant, crashing into Lewis [Hamilton], slamming his team…
“For me, those comments on Saturday night and Sunday were totally disrespectful and unnecessary. Because what happens on track, we fight hard, that’s part of racing. What happens in the stewards’ room, you fight hard, but it’s never personal. But he’s taken it too far now.”