Name: The evidence that convinced Red Bull Verstappen was robbed of Saudi Arabian GP victory
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T03:52:35.000Z
Duration: 10 min 47 s
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A penalty robbed Max Verstappen of victory in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, or at least you think that if you are Verstappen or Red Bull, to the point where team boss Christian Horner had to brandish new evidence to us to argue the case that Verstappen's penalty was unfair.

Basic passive voice

We're going to get into that and a lot more, but first of all, John, we should explain why Verstappen was punished in the first place for that run-in with Oskar Piastri.

So Oskar Piastri made a great start from the front row and pulled alongside him.

In basic terms, he was down the inside and gone.

Max tried to go around the outside, ran off the track and is gone.

In F1, they operate under driving guidelines, which are kind of rules that drivers have to follow and certain criteria that are hidden.

We don't get to see it, but we kind of pick up information.

But as far as we understand, there are four criteria that turn this incident that kind of confirmed that Oskar Piastri was in the right with this move.

The front axle was alongside Max Verstappen's mirror.

The second was that the driver had to overtake, his car had to be fully under his own control, which it was because he took the corner.

The third aspect was he couldn't deliberately push his rival off the track, which he didn't because Max Verstappen was voluntarily alongside him.

And he also had to keep his own car on the track as well, which he did because he came through turn one well within track limits and disappeared onto the outside.

So from Piastri's perspective, it was a fully legitimate move, everything all good.

Max Verstappen, the telemetry data showed he had carried too much speed into the run-off area, ran off the track and another circumstance also, didn't attempt to slow down and come back on at an early point, basically booted it, tried to straight line it, maintained quite a big advantage over Oskar Piastri and gone.

Stewards weren't happy with what they saw.

They felt Oskar had fulfilled the criteria he needed to.

Max had done what he shouldn't have done.

And I think the fact that Max was heading off track himself is a key reason why they didn't feel that Piastri had forced Verstappen off one of those four criteria that you were mentioning there.

And actually, I was at Christian Horner's media session and Christian came out armed with evidence.

He's done this a couple of times before and this time it was actually new evidence.

It was a printed image of a different camera that hadn't been available at the time.

There was an onboard camera on Verstappen's car pointing forward, but this one was slightly different.

This actually showed a little bit more of the front right corner of Piastri's car.

And Red Bull argues, Horner argued, that what this showed is that Verstappen was not only alongside Piastri, but ahead at the point that Piastri was at the apex of the corner.

I think the stewards disagree exactly on the positioning there because they think that actually showed what happened slightly further around the corner when Verstappen's releasing the brakes and running wide.

But Horner and Red Bull are absolutely adamant that Verstappen had done enough to be owed space and they felt that Piastri had crowded Verstappen out rather than Verstappen voluntarily going off track or choosing to go off track.

But the Red Bull position is unsurprisingly firm in Verstappen's favour.

We've seen this plenty of times before, but what did McLaren think?

Because while I was hearing from Christian Horner, you were getting Andrea Steller's point of view.

Yeah, Andrea Steller was very calm about the whole matter, as he invariably is.

He said he's surprised there's even polemics, he said, about this matter.

He said Oskar Piastri had won the right to the corner, he was ahead not only on the entry corner, he was ahead at the apex.

The corner was legitimately his, as was confirmed by the fact that he went through it, stayed on the track and carried on.

So he's thought, I don't even see what the problem is here.

He says Oskar Piastri fully understands the need to race clean, fully very precise in terms of where he positioned his car and he actually suggested that the onus was on Red Bull to have realised they'd done wrong.

They said in Bahrain, when Lando Nardin was racing Lewis Hamilton, there was a moment where Lando had taken a position off track, even though McLaren felt that Lewis had potentially pushed Lando a bit wide and it wasn't 100% Lando's fault, but that's an irrelevance that they knew they had to give the position back, so they gave the position back because the onus is on the team to take this decision.

So from McLaren's perspective, they said that's what they did last weekend and accepted it.

This is what they think Red Bull should have done this time.

The reason that they didn't do that is because Red Bull didn't think Verstappen had done anything wrong.

I actually think the real reason might be that they knew if they told Verstappen to hand the position back, he probably wasn't going to.

So there was obviously a difference there.

We're going to come on to Max's reaction and also what we think about this in a second because while Red Bull and McLaren made their own positions very clear, Max was playing things a little bit closer to the chest.

Before we go further, we should talk about whether or not anything more is going to come from this.

You can't protest a time penalty in the race.

Max also served it, so it wasn't like it was one that was added on at the end or anything like that, but you can, as we've seen so many teams do over the last few years, you can petition for a right of review, but it doesn't look like Red Bull is going to do that.

They do want to raise the matter with the FIA.

I did check before we started recording, that hadn't happened, but that image that Horner was brandishing when he came out to see us, he was keen that the FIA saw that onboard footage as Red Bull felt that it showed something different and they wanted to get clarity from that.

So I think the intention is to have that discussion, but they seem to feel it would be forlorn to go down the right of review route because the stewards had been unanimous in the original decision and they didn't feel they'd get anywhere.

So should we consider the matter to be dead and buried in terms of any changes to this race or challenging it from Red Bull's point of view?

I think in terms of this race, it's finished.

I don't think Red Bull have any particular interest in trying to force a case, take it further, push the right of review, try to get this result changed because it's done.

Max has served his penalty, the race has happened.

You can't have a situation where they try and get a calculator out and work out the time lost in the pit stop that he took in moving forward.

But I think what Red Bull will want is some more clarity on these racing rules and what are the criteria, how defined are they in terms of who has the right to the corner?

In particular, what are the responsibilities for the driver during the overtaking to leave room on the exit?

I think this is the thing they still aren't happy about, that there was no room for Max to turn left.

Even if he wasn't carrying too much speed in, if there wasn't space for him, he would have had to give the position.

And I think it's become more important also because we've seen in a season where overtaking is incredibly difficult.

Dirty air is a huge problem now, as we're seeing all the time.

So races are going to be won at the first corner.

We're going to go to tracks like Miami, we're going to go to tracks like Imola where there are similar types of corners where you want to get down the inside and you can potentially force your rival out or force him wide or do anything.

So I think they want clarity, they want some answers and also Max will want those answers to know what he needs to do in a repeat situation.

Especially as we know that Max is the type of driver, as he was in this scenario, who will push what he considers to be the rules to the limit.

He'll push the circuit layouts to the limit as well.

He has history of taking advantage of the run-off in Turn 1 here to see if he can squeeze it and get away with it.

I also think the other thing to say about the racing rules is they were tweaked for this year slightly.

I believe that it relates to what the defending driver needs to do rather than the attacking driver and that's what they're focused on.

But the FA don't want that information to be public at the moment.

It was meant to be in the International Sporting Code for this year but I think there's been so much back and forth over it, polemics to borrow that word that's still used on something else, maybe they're trying to keep their powder dry.

Let's get on to Max's reaction and then also our view too.

Max said among many other things or many other ways he chose not to comment on this, I cannot share my opinion on it because I might get penalised, which I think is a reference to the fact that he might swear if he said what he really thought and also as he pointed out, you can also get punished for hurting people's feelings, insulting people, causing moral injury and all that stuff.

I think this was a case of Max doing a very, very good job of keeping a lid on how he really felt across his TV appearances but also in the press conference he was actually quite forthcoming on other areas but he didn't want to get drawn into this penalty discussion much like he didn't want to get drawn into his future discussion the other day.

So how do you view Verstappen's kind of silent fury?

I think an intelligent approach, I think he knew there was nothing to gain.

He could mouth off all he wants and criticise it and throw his toys out the pram and say this is an outrage but it doesn't get him anything, it doesn't gain anything.

He's been around the block long enough to know these things come around and I think it was also interesting in the press conference today, he also talked about the problems of social media and the media themselves and he said sometimes your words can be twisted or people interpret in a different way.

So I think the danger also is that he says something here, it becomes a controversy and it's bubbling away, next race in Miami, it doesn't die away for two weeks and Max doesn't want to get bothered with that.

He's got a championship to fight for in a car that still is behind the McLaren although potentially you could argue could have been the fastest car today.

This is what he wants to concentrate on, he's got a championship to fight for, he's got race wins to fight for, he doesn't want to get time wasted on talks about his future, talks about track limits, talks about driving guidelines.

All he wants to concentrate on is getting on the job with the team and getting on to win races.

Well, we've been hiding behind what everybody else has been saying about this for so long so we might as well finish on what we think.

The way it's left things with Piastri obviously winning the race and Verstappen finishing second with Norris unable to recover to the podium, only finishing fourth.

Piastri's on 99 points, Norris is on 89 points, Verstappen 12 points back from Piastri on 87 points.

Now this is a race that Verstappen could have won and yes, the penalty may have taken it away from him but you can argue it was his behaviour that did that.

I think that is a little bit of a weakness of Verstappen, sometimes he can cause problems for himself as he has here.

It's also worth pointing out that all of the palaver around this has taken attention away from the fact that Max actually got a slightly poor start and that's the reason he was under pressure from Piastri into Turn 1.

So I think the penalty was fair game as is the fact that it was a lenient penalty because there was a bit of Turn 1, lap 1 leniency.