Max Verstappen reflects on his radio antics in recent times which has been criticised by F1 world, as Daniel Ricciardo and Frederic Vasseur opine.
The recent antics of Red Bull’s Verstappen on the radio has re-started the debate around broadcast and etiquettes situation. The Dutchman had a meltdown-like situation during the Hungarian GP against his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase on the radio.
Not only him, Verstappen called out the Red Bull team too about the strategy. Things like these are happening at a time when they are under pressure after fight from McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari, both in the drivers’ and constructors’ championship.
Verstappen, though, remains defiant about his demeanor on the radio and reckons people can turn down the volume if his language seems like inappropriate to them. “People that don’t like my language don’t have to listen to it,” he said to media. “Turn the volume down. I am very driven to success. I’ve proven that already.
“And I always want to optimize stuff. Now, people can argue that you might not be so vocal on the radio but that’s their opinion. My opinion is that it needs to be said at the time to maybe also try and force that the second pitstop would have been a bit different and yes that’s how it goes.
“We are very open-minded we are very critical to each other as a team and that’s been working for us very well, so I don’t expect that to change. That’s our approach. It’s important that you can be critical. Because in this world that we are living now, I feel anyway that a lot of people can’t take criticism anymore like it used to be and I don’t want to end up like that,” summed up Verstappen.
Regarding the broadcast situation, the Dutchman doesn’t have much say on it. He compares the situation with other sport where there is no mic on the players. “Well that’s also a thing,” said Verstappen. “In other sports people say things but they don’t have a mic attached to their mouth, so in a way maybe for the broadcasting, you can argue that.
“I don’t care. I say what I want. But that’s our sport as well, naturally. You’re communicating a lot with the people. You have, of course, the opportunity to talk. With other sports, maybe you swear to yourself about stuff that you didn’t like or a teammate that didn’t pass you the ball.
“You call them whatever it is but there is no mic so it’s just how our sport is I guess.” The Dutchman’s antics caught the eye of the F1 paddock too where Visa Cash App RB’s Ricciardo understood where Verstappen was coming from.
He understood the frustration that a driver can have sometimes. “I heard the in-race radio stuff,” Ricciardo noted. “I didn’t hear any TV pen or post-race stuff, so I don’t know if that continued. But yeah, I heard, let’s say, the little conversations between him and GP. Look, sometimes it’s hard to explain why we… Okay, I’ll put myself in this position.
“Some races I’m super calm and other races I’m agitated and everything frustrates me and annoys me. So sometimes our actions or the way we feel is not always predictable. Yeah, I mean, I don’t probably have enough… I mean, the context is, you know… I think there was one where GP said something about bringing the tyres in. Obviously, Max didn’t.
“He just probably pushed straight away. And that’s, I would say that’s coming from a place of frustration. So something leading up to that has probably made him just be like, I don’t care anymore. I’m just going to push and see what happens. So obviously, it’s probably built up frustration through the race. But yeah, it happens. I don’t know.
“I don’t really know how to answer it. Yeah, going back and forth, having conversations through the race, yeah, it’s probably not ideal, but yeah, I guess we’ve all been there at times where you, you know… For me, the race was frustrating in Hungary. For whatever reason, I chose silence to let that do the talking.
“And, okay, on the in-lap, then I said a bit more, but in a way I just couldn’t be bothered chatting about it through the race because for me, like what was done was done. So any talk I had kind of felt a bit hopeless or helpless. So that was my way of handling my frustration in that race. So it can vary.
“It’s race-to-race dependent, I guess. It’s a hot and sometimes very flustered environment in the cockpit.” Surprisingly, Ferrari’s Vasseur sided with Verstappen on the matter too, while using football as a comparing tool to state that there is frustration sometimes.
“I don’t know if I have to be politically correct or not, but at the end of the day, we have also to keep in mind that we are the only sport in the world where the guys are speaking on the radio during the effort or the race,” said Vasseur.
“I’m not sure that if you put a microphone on a football player, it would be much better. Even on the referee sometimes. It means that we have also to calm down with this. Or we have to switch off the microphone, but I’m not sure that it will be a step forward for the show.”
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