Verstappen blames Hamilton for costly late-race contact
It was a tough day at the race track for Max Verstappen, who was left fuming after a lack of pace and a number of strategy errors culminating in a late-race collision with Lewis Hamilton cost him a Hungarian GP podium.
“Today was a tough race for us so naturally that frustrated me as I want things to be better," he said. "If you look at the whole race I don’t think we were fast enough; we unfortunately just didn’t have the pace.
"As the pace of the car wasn’t as good, we really needed to capitalise on the strategy, and we just didn’t manage to do that today."
Verstappen started from third place on the grid and emerged from turn 1 up a place in second ahead of pole sitter Lewis Hamilton, although he was subsequently told to hand the position back to the Briton.
After that the Red Bull didn't seem to have the pace to challenge Norris and his team mate Oscar Piastri as they fought over the race win, and instead turned to holding on to P3 from his old Mercedes rival Lewis Hamilton.
Hamilton pitted earlier than Verstappen and the undercut put him ahead on lap 22, and the Dutch driver was unable to regain the initiative even when he had fresher tyres after his own, later stop.
It certainly wasn't for want of trying, and having dispatched Charles Leclerc with relative ease on lap 57 Verstappen committed to throwing everything he could at Hamilton in the closing laps.
The battle came to a head on lap 63. Having tried and failed to pass Hamilton at turn 1 on the previous lap, Verstappen tried again but ran in too deep. His rear-left clipped Hamilton’s front right, lifting the Red Bull into the air.
Verstappen laid the blame at Hamilton's door: “I got a lot of s*** thrown at me in Austria where people say I’m moving on the braking, blah blah blah,” he said, recalling his clash with Norris in Spielberg.
“I’m positioning my car in the initial movement and then I keep it straight, but today, under braking, he [Hamilton] just kept turning to the right.
"That’s why I also locked up, because of course I was going for the move. But I see the car on the outside just keeps coming at me," he explained. "I had to stop the car and that’s why I had to lock up, otherwise we would have crashed.
"I need to look back at what happened with Lewis, but I committed to the move and I don’t think I braked too late but we collided."
Both cars survived and made it to the finish and the stewards cleared both drivers of blame for the contact, but it meant Verstappen was passed by Leclerc and ended up in fifth place at the line.
That's not what the team was hoping for and expecting, having brought a load of upgrades to Budapest and suggesting it would set the tone for the rest of their increasingly troubled season.
“Yeah tough," he said when asked to describe today's race. "We didn’t have the pace to fight McLaren today, but then I think we could still have had a P3."
Rather than blaming the upgrades, Verstappen felt that it was the execution that had gone wrong today. "The wrong strategy calls put me on the back foot where constantly had to fight people, try to overtake, but it didn’t work.
"We got stuck behind cars and let ourselves get undercut and I think we just didn’t have our best day. We had to fight our way back and lost so much time that we lost touch with both the McLarens.
“I’d hoped that maybe the second pit stop would be a better call, but it wasn’t." As a result, Verstappen sounded unusually irate over the Red Bull team radio, and he admitted that he had found it difficult to keep his cool today.
“Of course I’m annoyed," he said. "But I’ve been annoyed before. Sometimes you press the radio to voice your opinion, and that’s what I did today.
“For me that's not distracting when I’m driving. Of course I’m annoyed, but you also then focus back on what you have to do - and that’s of course control the car.
“I knew of course it was already going to be a difficult race and beating McLaren would be tough, but then you at least need to get a P3 over the line and even that was difficult."
He added that "it was really hot" and pinpointed this as being another factor. “Today was quite hot again. When you don’t have a good balance you kind of look after the tyres and that’s it," he admitted.
"The high temperatures on the track also meant that the tyres overheated, especially when we were trying to overtake throughout the race, which was very tough. All the advantage you have with the tyres is not working anymore."
Whether Red Bull can now do anything to turn around their apparently flagging fortunes before next week's Belgian Grand Prix, the last race before Formula 1's mandatory summer shutdown, remains to be seen.
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