Is Max Verstappen Now Officially an Asshole?
A couple of weeks ago, we posted on this very site a missive of mine stating that Max Verstappen is not an asshole. But after Verstappen’s on-track antics at this weekend’s grand prix in Brazil (which have inflamed social media and a few members of this staff), I have had to adjust my take on the two-time world champ.
So here it is: Max Verstappen is still not an asshole. Yes, he was penalized for contact with his rejuvenated nemesis, Lewis Hamilton. And yes, he defied team orders and took points from his teammate. And, since he’s already the 2022 champ, not only did Verstappen not need the two additional points he got by staying ahead of Sergio Perez, but he took them from a seemingly kind teammate—a teammate who needed them to stay in second place in the drivers’ championship.
It did not play well in a world of insta-pundits. Again, none of that makes Verstappen anything but a racer. Okay, he’s an insanely talented, intensely focused, and unapologetic racer. But he’s just a racer doing his job and doing it better than anyone else in the field. The young man has done himself no favors in the court of public opinion, particularly, it seems, in the opinions of the newer so-called casual fans brought it by the Netflix series Drive to Survive. On the program, Toto Wolff preens, Christian Horner snipes, Guenther Steiner cusses hilariously, and the undeniably charming Daniel Ricciardo clowns for the cameras, all building their celebrity. Max considers the show’s presentation dishonest and demands a distraction. People want him to perform for the camera. The point is his demeanor in public, and his sometimes-blunt words, make him seem like a spoilsport and have earned him no goodwill.
Consider the collision between Verstappen and Hamilton at Turn 2 on lap 7. It’s true that the stewards penalized Verstappen for the contact. My view is more along the lines of Sky Sports commentator and former driver Martin Brundle’s, that it was more or less a racing incident. Verstappen had earned a little space from Hamilton. Here were two competitors with a sordid history fighting each other hard. But Verstappen didn’t dive-bomb Hamilton. He was beside him, approaching the apex of the corner. True, Verstappen wasn’t ahead of Hamilton approaching the apex, but there was nothing untoward in the way Verstappen tried to defend his position. It’s worth noting that in a race with an unusually high number of passes for position, neither Hamilton nor Verstappen were accused of dirty dealing. These two drivers still carry wounds from their contentious battles last year, and both are inclined to give no quarter. And why would they? They are racers.
What really lit the fires of widespread indignation in polite society was when Verstappen refused to cede sixth place to teammate Perez on the final lap after Perez apparently let Verstappen pass shortly before. Whether Perez let him through because of team orders is not the issue. Perez, struggling on medium tires, was tumbling down the order. There was no way he could have held off a resurgent Verstappen (on soft tires) anyway. It is the team’s responsibility to maximize the whole team’s performance. To tell Verstappen to stay behind Perez would be ridiculous. Typically, the people crying about Verstappen failing to follow the team’s direction are the same who abhor the imposition of team orders. And you know who abhors team orders more than anyone? Racers. That is unless they gain from it at the expense of their teammate. Notice how, in the race’s closing stages, Charles Leclerc whined over the radio for the Ferrari to tell Carlos Sainz to give up the podium position he’d earned so that Leclerc could get the upper hand against Perez for second place in the championship? That seemed pretty ridiculous, right?
Yet it felt unseemly when Verstappen over the radio said he wouldn’t do it. He sounded like a spoiled brat who believes he runs the team. In a way, he more or less does. It’s molded around him. No teammate has been able to compete with him, and, let’s face it, Red Bull has been ruthless in its treatment of those who tried and failed. Should Verstappen have given the place to Perez? The better question is: Should the team have publicly demanded that he give the place to Perez? Is it appropriate to ask if, as Verstappen pointed out in his bossy voice, they had discussed all of this before the race? What did they discuss before the race? Well, it would seem, based on Verstappen’s strategic non-answers after the race, that he believes Perez intentionally crashed at the end of qualifying at Monaco this year. This red-flagged qualifying and denied Verstappen the chance for pole and the win. I have no idea if Perez did this intentionally. But the one person who clearly pulled that trick at Monaco was Michael Schumacher, who stopped his Ferrari partly blocking the tight Monaco track and ending qualifying with him on pole. Schumacher was rightly thought of as an asshole for doing this.
Formula 1 has a rich history of ignored team orders. Racing might be a team sport, but it certainly isn’t in the same way as basketball or soccer, or most of the rest of them. One driver’s success simply doesn’t rely on the team’s other driver in the same way players rely on one another in other sports.
Most of you will remember, “Multi 21, Seb!” That was Mark Webber’s enraged reaction to Sebastian Vettel’s refusal to follow team orders and let him pass. That would be the same Vettel who is now deified by the same people who hated him then. But he’s a racer: a single-minded, high-performance machine trained to take every advantage he can get and who, like every driver, is reminded regularly that a team can dump him pretty much whenever they’d like.
If you want to see a genuine villain and, yes, an asshole, there’s always Lance Stroll, who has swerved wildly and dangerously for the second race in a row to try to avoid being passed on a straight. At the Austin race, Stroll sent Fernando Alonso into the longest wheelie known to F1. And, at Brazil, he ran Vettel, his own teammate, onto the grass at high speed. Now that’s an asshole.
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