Why Verstappen's moment of madness in the Spanish GP wasn't all his own doing

Having attended the Spanish Grand Prix, you leave Barcelona feeling privileged if you can hand your hire car back without its back window stoved in and anything you’d been daft enough to leave stashed in the boot being hawked around the local trattorias for cash.

At the risk of inflaming the ire of those who habitually jam the section ‘below the line’ with ad hominem twaddle about ‘byAs BriTish jUrnuLizm’ and such, Max Verstappen was pretty fortunate to hotfoot it to El Prat and step aboard his plane with just his luggage and three extra penalty points on his licence. You need to regard the incident between Max and George Russell at Turn 5 after the Safety Car restart through some highly specialised optics, while performing a mental gymnastics routine worthy of at least a 5.9, to conclude that this was anything other than a dangerous moment of madness.

Still, it’s a free internet. Go ahead. I won’t stop you. Make sure you nail the landing.

But Max’s aren’t the only fingerprints on the smoking gun.

When you examine the direction of travel towards an accident – and this applies similarly to aircraft crashes, building collapses and other such disasters – the route is waymarked by many small errors of judgement.

In this case, Red Bull committed early to a three-stop strategy which helped Verstappen not only to get nearer the dominant McLaren pairing of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris in terms of net position than might have been expected, but also to spend six laps classified as the race leader. But the Safety Car on lap 54 undid that strategy since it left Verstappen on used softs which he’d been pushing hard for seven laps while catching Norris through traffic.

That line of traffic had been intense – Nico Hulkenberg, Gabriel Bortoleto, Pierre Gasly, Oliver Bearman, Liam Lawson and Fernando Alonso – and Verstappen felt Bearman had held him up.

“We were one second behind Norris, but then came the backmarkers,” Red Bull driver advisor Helmut Marko told the Austrian ORF TV channel later. “I think Bearman didn’t get out of the way right away, and that added to everything else – and that just made Max even more agitated.”

Was Verstappen solely to blame for the late madness?

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Juggling the possibilities of when the race might restart (and, therefore, how many racing laps were left) and the possibility of Verstappen being jumped at that restart, Red Bull decided that the only new set of tyres it had available – the hard-compound C1s – were better than another set of softs which had already taken a pounding. Verstappen was aghast enough to comment about this over the radio; if he wasn’t already in a state of high agitation, he was now.

Come the restart on lap 61, and the inevitable twitch of oversteer under acceleration served as a reminder why nobody else had invited their C1s to the ball, despite Pirelli’s claim on Saturday night that track evolution might make the hitherto unfancied rubber raceable. Charles Leclerc was instantly alongside and made firm enough wheel-to-wheel contact to warrant a trip to the stewards later – and add to the velocity at which Verstappen’s day was heading south.

Russell then arrived up the inside at Turn 1 and, although he was ahead enough to lay legitimate claim to ‘owning’ the apex, a brief twitch of oversteer was enough to deliver the Red Bull another tap and send it up the escape road. Verstappen took the prescribed route past the bollard and emerged ahead of Russell, whereupon race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase prevailed upon him to give the position back.

"You can see that it's been reported. It's going to the stewards. It looked for all intents and purposes that it was going to be a penalty, so therefore the instruction was given to Max to give that place back, which he was obviously upset about and annoyed about because he felt that, one, he'd been left no space and, two, that George hadn't been fully in control" Christian Horner

It's worth replaying the conversation in detail.

“Max, can you let Russell through, please? Let Russell through.”

“No, I was ahead, mate,” replied Verstappen. “What the f***?”

“My advice is to let him through.”

“Mate, I was ahead. He just ran me off the road.”

“But that's the rules. That's the rules we have to play with. It's a shame, but that's the rules.”

Judging by what happened next, this was the tipping point. Verstappen’s petulant assault on Russell was both ridiculous and unbecoming of a driver of his stature, but it was not all of his own making.

Each small misjudgement led to the next – and the team must bear at least some of the responsibility for feeding Max’s fury and enabling moments of madness such as this. And, it must be said, subsequently defending it.

Red Bull is also at fault for Verstappen's downfall in Barcelona

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

Red Bull’s default setting is “us against the world” and, in radio conversations such as the above, you can hear Lambiase feeding it to Verstappen on a silver platter with crushed ice and seaweed trimmings.

Max's default response in situations such as this is that he is right and race control is wrong – so it's perhaps ironic that, in examining the two 'incidents' at Turn 1-2 (the pass itself and Verstappen 'leaving the track and gaining an advantage'), the stewards concurred he was in the right. It was the team which appeared to make a snap decision to direct him to hand the position back and then, later, suggest it was all the FIA's fault.

Applying 1000 Newtons to each side of the front wings wasn't the only deflection exercise going on this weekend.

Team boss Christian Horner’s post-race briefing was also redolent with the sensation of constantly being hard done-by.

“Max had a snap at the restart,” he said. “Charles got alongside him. It looked like he pulled left on him, which is what they're up in front of the stewards now [the outcome was “neither driver was wholly or predominantly to blame”].

“And then George obviously tried to capitalise on that into Turm 1 and it was very, very marginal. Now, on recent experience and looking at recent incidents, obviously it's subjective.

“You've asked for guidance from the FIA, from the referee. Essentially, there's nothing come back.

“You can see that it's been reported. It's going to the stewards. It looked for all intents and purposes that it was going to be a penalty, so therefore the instruction was given to Max to give that place back, which he was obviously upset about and annoyed about because he felt that, one, he'd been left no space and, two, that George hadn't been fully in control.

“So after, obviously, a conversation with his engineer, he elected to give the space back at Turn 5. There was contact between the two cars.”

Horner is aggrieved that the stewards didn't come to their decision sooner

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

That final sentence, expressed in the passive voice, is phrased as if the collision happened spontaneously and without any cause. And yet there is a clear chain of causation. It ends in a destructive Max temper tantrum, of that there’s no doubt. But he didn’t get there on his own.

We could even follow that chain back to the preceding weeks and months, during which Verstappen has consistently chafed about the behaviour of his car, and the team’s response has been to point the finger elsewhere. Firing the other driver. Claiming that the McLaren is only faster because it has some secret and illegal woo-woo going on with its front and rear wings and brake cowlings.

This weekend the entire grid had to contend with new and more stringent front-wing flexibility tests, and the result has been… not much. Verstappen was among the voices pointing out that aero-elasticity wasn’t the reason for Red Bull being where it was.

Verstappen’s road-rage incident in Spain has been long in the making

Max has also come to the defence of embattled team-mate Yuki Tsunoda, pointing out the trend of the other car underperforming “has been going on a long time” despite the rotating cast of characters in its cockpit. The car, he suggested, is the common denominator.

So Verstappen’s road-rage incident in Spain has been long in the making. And it’s about time Red Bull took some responsibility for enabling it.

Will Red Bull accept fault for the incident?

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images via Getty Images