No tension during the GP of Belgium on Sunday, but (for a while) during the qualifying sessions two days earlier. Max Verstappen raged at his engineer and he immediately responded to the Dutchman. The specialists of The Paddock come back to the striking incident.
Verstappen advanced to the last heat (Q3) in tenth and last place on Friday and at that moment showed his dissatisfaction with the chosen tactics during a short outburst of anger. His race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase reacted coolly and somewhat cynically.
Afterwards, the two had a good laugh about it, as so often. Especially because Verstappen wreaked havoc and was more than eight tenths of a second faster than number two Charles Leclerc. “Sorry for my outburst towards the GP,” said Verstappen immediately after qualifying, to which Lambiase replied: “I’m slowly getting used to it…”
The Paddock: “Not strange that he gets angry at such a moment”
In Formula 1-podcast The Paddock the specialists came back to the incident. “Verstappen is such a competitive beast… I get it somehow,” says F2 and F3 commentator Jarno Boone. “If you win every race with two fingers in the nose, then of course you want to keep it interesting for yourself in one way or another. If you’re only tenth then, you’ll be disappointed. You know that you have the fastest car and that you are the best driver at the moment, then you don’t want to go through to Q3 in tenth. I don’t think it’s strange that he gets angry at such a moment.”
Watch the full episode here The Paddock: