Max Verstappen angry with George Russell after qualifying incident at Qatar GP

CNN
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Max Verstappen took his ninth victory of the 2024 Formula 1 season at the Qatar Grand Prix on Sunday, although he wasn’t exactly in a celebratory mood after the race and accused Mercedes driver George Russell of trying to “screw him” .

The Red Bull driver secured pole position on Saturday but was hit with a rare one-place grid penalty after being accused of driving unnecessarily slowly and hindering Russell in qualifying. This meant Russell was subsequently promoted to P1.

The stewards considered this a “complicated” case as both drivers drove slow laps instead of pushing in the qualifying laps.

Verstappen – who officially won his fourth drivers’ world championship at the last GP in Las Vegas – overtook the Brit at the start of the race and maintained his lead and took victory. But the incident was clearly still on his mind after he crossed the finish line, telling the media that he had “lost all respect” for Russell.

“I think this is the first time that someone has been penalized for a slow lap,” Verstappen said in the post-race press conference. “Even though I was just trying to be nice, maybe I shouldn’t be nice.

Verstappen speaks during the press conference after the victory.

“At the end of the season everything is more or less decided, especially for me I didn’t want to encourage anyone to prepare their round. And when you do that, you know, when you’re nice, you basically get a punishment. And that’s what I tried to explain. But I just felt like I was talking to a wall.

“Sitting there in the stewards’ room I was quite surprised at what was going on.
Honestly, very disappointing because I think we’re all here, we respect each other a lot and of course in my life, in my career, I’ve been in that meeting room many times with people that I’ve raced against and I still have never seen anyone try to screw anyone so hard.”

After the incident in qualifying, Russell said he was concerned about damage to his car, explaining that he “ended up slipping through the gravel all over the ground, so it felt like the ground was going over the curb and through the Grinding gravel.”

He also told Sky Sports after qualifying that Verstappen “was clearly driving too slowly, I followed the rule and almost crashed.”

Russell ultimately finished the race in fourth, while Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri finished second and third behind Verstappen in a chaotic race.

The safety car was deployed three times on Sunday, the first of which came on the first lap when a collision between Nico Hulkenberg and Esteban Ocon resulted in Ocon hitting Franco Colapinto and both drivers being thrown out of the race.

A wing mirror from Alex Albon’s Williams car was later shown flying, with the ensuing debris causing tire damage to Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Russell’s teammate Lewis Hamilton, and the safety car was brought out again.

Verstappen’s former title rival Lando Norris tried to catch the Dutchman napping on the restart, but the reigning champion held him back. Norris was later hit with a devastating 10-second stop-and-serve penalty for failing to slow down during a yellow flag period, knocking the British driver out of podium contention and ultimately finishing in 10th place.

Hamilton was also penalized for two separate incidents: first serving a five-second time penalty for a false start, before being given a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane after puncturing a tire. The seven-time world champion was audibly dejected over the team radio in his penultimate race for Mercedes and even told his engineers that he would be retiring the car himself.