How Red Bull’s belief they are a “cheap target” led to their Sky boycott in Mexico · RaceFans

Red Bull and Max Verstappen’s refusal to co-operate with Formula 1 broadcaster Sky during the Mexican Grand Prix is the latest example of the world champions demonstrating their dissatisfaction with how their successes are being reported.

The team said this was not the first time this year they’d had cause to complain about Sky’s coverage. Nor were their concerns limited to Sky’s English-language service – which broadcasts in the UK, USA and elsewhere – but some of its other channels too.

Red Bull said their decision to pull their team staff from interviews with the broadcaster was triggered by the “accusations of championships being ‘robbed’” in their coverage of the United States Grand Prix the week before. This appears to refer to Ted Kravitz’s Notebook feature from that weekend.

During his regular post-race segment, which takes the form of a monologue to camera interspersed with ad-hoc interviews, Kravitz referred to Brad Pitt’s appearance in the paddock and his plans to produce a film with Lewis Hamilton. This followed a race in which Hamilton was passed for victory by Verstappen, who beat him to last year’s world championship in deeply controversial circumstances.

The race at the Circuit of the Americas seemed a better plot for a film than the one Pitt is pushing, Kravitz opined. “We know, pretty much, the script,” he began. “Because it seems to be the same script everyone’s doing in F1, which is old driver in retirement, ‘oh, I can’t drive any more’, comes out of retirement to help troubled young driver deliver in F1. That old trope.

“But I liked today’s script that eight, seven-time world champion – I almost said eight-time world champion – seven-time world champion goes into a final race trying to be the greatest of all time and win the championship, gets robbed, comes back, his next year’s car is rubbish – rubbish in a movie sense – his next year’s car is rubbish, doesn’t win a race all year and then finally comes back at a track where he could win the first race all year is battling with the same guy who won the race that he was robbed in the previous year, and manages to finish ahead of him. What a script and a story that would have been.”

Verstappen did not specify what prompted Red Bull’s boycott, but explained why he’d become increasingly frustrated with Sky’s coverage over the year.

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