Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was in no mood for Formula One’s August holiday break after an engine failure sidelined him after five laps of Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
Red Bull's Max Verstappen before the race
Budapest:
The Dutch driver’s expletive-laden reaction over the team radio was largely bleeped out for the worldwide television audience.
“I don’t really feel like going away on holiday now as this isn’t the way I wanted to finish the first part of the season,” he said later.
“I would like to get back in the car to race again and finish on a strong result, unfortunately I can’t,” added the 20-year-old.
The youngest ever race winner in Formula One history, Verstappen has an army of fans with thousands travelling to Budapest to cheer him on.
He feared they could suffer further disappointment down the line.
“I’m not sure if this will mean engine penalties for Spa,” he said, referring to the Belgian Grand Prix at the end of August which is also the closest to his home.
Team boss Christian Horner turned his sights on engine provider Renault.
“Sometimes words betray you,” the Briton told Sky Sports F1 television.
“Cruel luck for Max, it’s an engine issue. I suppose no surprise really,” he added.
“I’m not going to get drawn into saying too much. We pay multi-millions of pounds for these engines and for first class, or state-of-the-art, product and you can see it’s quite clearly some way below that.”
Horner said he would let Renault F1 managing director Cyril Abiteboul “come up with the excuses afterwards”.
Red Bull are ditching Renault at the end of the season and switching to Honda from 2019.
Renault powered the former champions to drivers’ and constructor’s titles for four years in a row between 2010 and 2013 but the relationship has frayed in the current V6 turbo hybrid era.
Red Bull had fancied their chances in Hungary before the weekend but rain in qualifying dented their hopes, with 20-year-old Verstappen starting seventh and Daniel Ricciardo back in 12th. The Australian finished fourth.
Ricciardo, race winner in Monaco, took grid penalties in Germany last weekend — starting at the rear of the field — to give himself the best chance in Hungary but retired from that race due to a power unit problem.
It subsequently emerged that the Australian had been unable to take all the new components Red Bull had wanted because Renault made only three of the six items available.
The normal strategy would have been to change everything.