For a long time it looked like Max Verstappen would drive to victory in the Austrian GP without any problems. Due to a mediocre tire strategy, the good feeling in the car that suddenly disappeared and two bad pit stops, Verstappen still had a fight. The epic battle with Norris led to back and forth rejections and ultimately a clash. Norris was furious after the race and immediately blamed Verstappen for the crash. Now Verstappen has looked back at the images and he also makes a judgement.
In a video on Red Bull Racing’s Instagram channel, Verstappen shares his side of the story. According to the reigning world champion, Norris’ overtaking attempts were somewhat ambitious. ‘I’ve had some time now to look at things and I think the first actions [van Norris] came from quite a distance,” says Verstappen. He then starts talking about the moment things went wrong.
The crash between Verstappen and Norris
“The moment we touched felt a bit awkward. In the car you initially think ‘did I do something wrong? Did I not leave enough space, like half the width of the car?'” says the Dutch driver. Now that he has seen the footage, Verstappen thinks Norris had enough space.
Verstappen: ‘I honestly think I left a car’s width of space at the white line. Of course you are also racing hard. I’m not going to give two car widths of space, am I? Then I know that he will overtake me at the exit of the bend. You race hard to win and I think that’s how it should be.’
Lando Norris previously indicated that the friendship between the drivers has suffered a blow. Verstappen also responds to this: ‘As friends you never want to hit each other and you never want to crash, but it happened now. It’s not nice, but this is also part of racing. We are of course both disappointed by the outcome of this story, but we also have to look at the race as a whole.’
Verstappen is critical of Red Bull Racing
By ‘we’ Verstappen means his team. The driver is hard on his colleagues and says: ‘We did a lot of things wrong. We had two really bad pit stops and that put us back and we were fighting at the end of the race. We had a healthy lead and we could have seen a completely different race if we had executed the race better. So those are definitely things to look at and do better for next week.”
Verstappen has no explanation yet as to why his car suddenly became so much slower. ‘With the car itself I also had the idea that something went wrong after the first stint, because I still felt very comfortable then. Suddenly the balance in the car changed enormously so there are definitely things we have to look at for next week’, says Verstappen. Then the saga continues in Great Britain at the Silverstone circuit.
#Verstappen #watches #footage #crash #blames #Norris