Steiner and swear words
He had been called into question directly by Alex Wurz, the president of the GPDA association: in commenting on the now long-standing swearing affair in F1, the former Austrian driver had joked about how many hours of community service he would have had to serve Gunther Steiner. The South Tyrolean manager in fact became known to the general public also for that characteristic colorful language which immediately made him one of the undisputed protagonists of the Netflix docu-series Drive to Survive. And it is precisely the swear words in the press conference that led to the conviction of Max Verstappen, which the former Haas team principal wanted to talk about at the presentation of his new autobiographical book Unfiltered.
The former Haas defends Verstappen
“Max didn’t insult anyone – said Steiner interviewed by BBC Sports – but he just used a bad word to describe his car. So I don’t think anyone was offended by that. I think the best way to handle this would have been Don’t make a big deal out of it. We had to sit at a table with the drivers, and after all, all 20 of them have a meeting together at every race, and say: ‘Ok guys, could you please tone it down a little? We at the FIA don’t particularly like this‘. Instead they said publicly: ‘You will be fined, you will get a penalty if you swear‘. We know, these guys also have a certain ego, and inevitably they responded that they didn’t want to do it. So all this controversy was created for nothing”.
Steiner then also spoke about his particular use of swear words, joking about being “a good boy”: “I don’t swear, you’ve heard me in many press conferences over the years. I swear when I’m in battle, not during interviews. I do it in hot moments, when there is so much adrenaline and so many emotions… We often tell ourselves that we need to think about the children who look at us, but it is also true that children hear swear words everywhere anyway. Swearing has changed a lot today compared to 20 years ago. However, the case in which someone is offended is different. But I can still understand it if a driver does it in a race because he is going at 350 km/h and another has cut him off. It’s normal that he doesn’t say ‘Hi friend, you shouldn’t have done that‘”.
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