Max Verstappen slammed his team and race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase on the radio at the Hungarian GP after he felt he needed to work harder to salvage a result because of the mistakes the rest of his side made. Guenther Steiner has now come out to explain what would’ve been his course of action to calm the Dutchman.
“I would have tried to calm him down. He now feels the pressure. Going against him would’ve instigated more of him, would’ve upset him even more”, said Steiner on the F1 podcast uploaded on RacingNews365’s YouTube channel. The former Haas team principal further explained how not being in the dominant car is rattling Verstappen.
Hamilton says Verstappen needs to “act like a world champion” and “be a team leader” after the his radio outbursts in Hungary pic.twitter.com/FrfcgeU2lK
— Motorsport.com (@Motorsport) July 26, 2024
Steiner added, “Max is a pretty smart guy but I think the emotions got the better of him because when you are used to winning quite dominantly and all of a sudden you’re under pressure, you need to do something different. You just hit out at everything.”
The frustration was evident in Verstappen’s radio messages and the post-race interviews. What made things worse was Red Bull’s poor strategy at the Hungarian GP and Lambiase seeming to have given up on the Dutchman during the race following the 26-year-old’s explicit radio calls.
Steiner suggested that Christian Horner and Helmut Marko would’ve definitely had a word with Verstappen after the race in an attempt to calm the championship leader down. The very next week at the Belgian GP, Verstappen seemed in a great mood and also joked on the radio with Lambiase, suggesting that all was again hunky dory in the Red Bull camp.
However, it is pertinent to note that another moment of pressure could once again rattle Verstappen, as Steiner pointed out in the podcast. After all, the 26-year-old has not faced such tough competition for two years now, having dominated both the 2022 and 2023 campaigns.
