Max Verstappen’s F1 meltdown in Barcelona on Sunday has had a significant impact, and it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon.
Late in the race at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, the four-time world champion collided with George Russell while reserving a spot for the Mercedes driver, and he paid the price handsomely.
Verstappen was handed a 10-second time penalty, relegating him from P5 to P10 in the final classification, and later awarded three penalty points – putting him at very real risk of an imminent race ban.
Afterwards the Dutchman was widely criticised for his actions, but many experts also believe a fair portion of the blame lies elsewhere.
Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase came under fire in some quarters for informing Max that he needed to give the place back to Russell following an earlier incident – the FIA later ruled that he had broken no rules.
Some pundits though believe the trouble started even before that – specifically with the tyre strategy which left Verstappen switching to the suboptimal hard tyre for the final portion of the race following a safety car restart.
One man clearly in that camp is former key Red Bull figure and Haas team principal Guenther Steiner.
Steiner on Verstappen penalty controversy
Drive To Survive sensation Steiner gives out two awards at the end of the regular Red Flags podcast – both matching his most famous phrases – ‘Rockstars’ and ‘W***ers’.
In this week’s episode, Steiner thought long and hard before settling on who got the award for ‘W***ers Of The Week’ , first considering handing it to Verstappen or the FIA.
In the end though he found the way that tyre strategy unfolded unforgivable, revealing: “Who is the w***er? Max? The FIA? We discussed it at length here. Not making a tough decision, stopping doing this in the future. Setting a precedent, could be that as well because Max will do the same again, everybody else can do.
“Red Bull, they put Max on the hard tyre. They did a perfect job until then and then they did one quick move and we declare them as the w***ers of the week. That is how we do it.”
Is Verstappen race ban danger for real?
The danger of a Verstappen race ban is indeed real – he has 11 penalty points now on his licence and getting to 12 would trigger a ban.
The first of those points don’t expire until June 30, meaning he has to go two races without picking up another penalty point or he will be banned.
