Max Verstappen vs George Russell – What’s going on?

The context of all this is impossible to ignore on both sides.

For Verstappen, the incident came at the end of a long, difficult season that has been his most impressive on many different levels.

He won the championship with two races remaining despite only having the fastest car for the first five Grands Prix, and he did so by driving with consistent excellence that no one could match. Everyone in F1 – including Russell – accepts it.

As Alonso said on Thursday: “When I saw the car as the third, sometimes fourth fastest car… When I saw the McLaren win by one-two in a race the summer before… Zandvoort In, Lando won by 25 seconds from second or something like that… I thought, OK, the championship will be tight until Abu Dhabi, but then it was not tight because one driver was excellent.”

At the same time, Verstappen is uniting a team that sometimes looks as if it is falling apart at the seams.

It began with allegations of sexual harassment leveled against team principal Christian Horner, which he has always denied and two internal investigations have cleared of him.

Verstappen’s father Jos is in an ongoing dispute with Horner as a result of the allegations. They are rubbing off quite well at the moment, but Horner knows both Verstappens must be treated with caution.

Max has also faced the resignation of the greatest designer in F1 history, Adrian Newey, at least partly as a result of the allegations against Horner. and the departure of two other senior figures with whom he has worked closely for nearly a decade.

And he has led his team from the front in any crunch time with his car performances during the summer, on the one hand, and his brilliant, cathartic, career-defining and essentially title-clinching win in the wet in Brazil. Resulted in. On the grid from the 17th.

Meanwhile, Russell, as director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, is at the forefront of the drivers’ efforts to get the FIA ​​to rewrite the rules governing racing, a move that would lead to Norris’s tenure at the US Grand Prix. The opposition was triggered by Verstappen’s driving.

After Verstappen defended his lead in Austin with his trademark ‘dive-bomb’ defense – ensuring he was complying with the rules by staying ahead at the top, but sending both cars off the track on the exit, A move he used several times against Lewis Hamilton in 2021 – the drivers had had enough.

To a man, they like Verstappen as a person and respect him as a driver. But as Verstappen himself said in the BBC Sport interview in Las Vegas: “It’s not necessarily how I am on the track, it’s not how I am off the track. I know on the track, if you want to win, if You want to be a champion, you need to be on the edge.”

And for many of his fellow drivers, Verstappen can drive at extremes that they do not find acceptable.

The Austin incident was followed by a drivers’ meeting in Mexico a week later in which the majority of drivers made it clear that they wanted the racing rules rewritten in such a way that the dive-bomb defense was no longer allowed indirectly. , may not even be encouraged.

After that meeting, Russell said that 19 out of 20 drivers “agree where it’s needed”. He did not say who the exception was. He didn’t need it.

Two days later, at the Mexico City Grand Prix, Verstappen went even more extreme in his driving against Norris, earning him two separate 10-second penalties for two different moves on one lap.

Russell said on Thursday: “Lewis is the champion I want to be – tough but fair, never over the line.

“I’m not losing any sleep over this. I never intended to speak out or act this way, but he’s gone too far with this personal attack and I’m laying out the truth and returning the favor.” Am.”

Another dimension has been added to this. Their dispute also revives the dispute between their two teams, which has largely lay dormant since the bitter title battle between Verstappen and Hamilton in 2021.

After Horner called Russell “hysterical” in Qatar, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff decided he should be involved in the task. Wolfe, unusually, attended Russell’s press conference on Thursday, and indicated to a reporter that he too was interested in being asked a question.

He took a dig at Horner: “Why does he feel entitled to comment about my driver? Yelling little terrier, always with something to say.”