‘I lost all respect’: Max Verstappen furious with George Russell after qualifying incident at Qatar Grand Prix

By Sam Joseph, CNN

(CNN) — Max Verstappen took his ninth victory of the 2024 Formula One season at the Qatar Grand Prix on Sunday, though he wasn’t exactly in a celebratory mood after the race, accusing Mercedes’ George Russell of trying to “screw him over.”

The Red Bull driver took pole position on Saturday but was handed a rare one-place grid penalty after he was deemed to have driven unnecessarily slowly and impeded Russell during qualifying. This meant that Russell was subsequently promoted to P1.

The stewards regarded this as a “complicated” case as both drivers were on slow laps, rather than pushing on qualifying laps.

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

“I think that’s the first time that in a slow lap someone has been penalized,” Verstappen said in the postrace press conference. “While, actually, I just tried to be nice, so maybe I shouldn’t be nice.

“At the end of the season, everything is more or less decided, for me especially, I didn’t want to screw anyone over to prepare their lap. And by doing that, you know, being nice, basically you get a penalty. And that’s what I tried to explain as well. But I just felt like I was talking to a brick wall.

“I was quite surprised when sitting there in the Stewards’ room, what was all going on.
Honestly, very disappointing because I think we’re all here, we respect each other a lot and, of course, I’ve been in that meeting room many times in my life, in my career with people that I’ve raced and I’ve never seen someone trying to screw someone over that hard.”

After the qualifying incident, Russell said that he was worried about damage to his car, explaining how he “ended up going through the gravel all over the floor, so it felt like the floor was scraping over that curb and through the gravel.”

He also told Sky Sports after qualifying that Verstappen “was clearly going too slow, I was following the rule and almost had the crash.”

Russell eventually finished the race in fourth, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri coming home behind Verstappen in second and third respectively in a chaotic race.

The Safety Car made three appearances on Sunday, the first of which came on the opening lap when a collision between Nico Hülkenberg and Esteban Ocon caused Ocon to hit Franco Colapinto, taking both drivers out of the race.

Later, a wing mirror was shown flying off Alex Albon’s Williams car, with the subsequent debris causing punctures for 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 off. Norris was later tagged with a devastating 10-second stop-go penalty for failing to slow down during a yellow flag period, taking the British driver out of podium contention as he eventually finishing 10th.

Hamilton was also punished for two separate incidents, first serving a five-second time penalty for a false start before being hit with a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pitlane after suffering a puncture. The seven-time world champion was audibly dejected over the team radio in what was his penultimate race for Mercedes, even telling his engineers that he was going to retire the car himself.

After the second restart, the Safety Car came out for the third time with Hülkenberg having beached himself in the gravel trap.

All the chaos let Zhou Guanyu score his and Sauber’s first points of the season, crossing the line in P8.

F1 heads to Abu Dhabi for the final race of the season this weekend.

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