Max Verstappen gave Red Bull both barrels over their strategy calls as he fell to fifth place in the Hungarian Grand Prix.
His dissatisfaction reached a peak when his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase jokingly chastised him for setting the fastest lap at the beginning of his final stint when he’d been told to bring his new tyres up to temperature gently.
“Well that’s some gentle introduction,” remarked Lambiase. “No mate, don’t give me that bullshit now,” Verstappen fumed. “You guys gave me this fucking strategy, okay. I’m trying to race with what’s left. Fuck’s sake.”
Verstappen ran third in the first stint but fell behind Lewis Hamilton after the Mercedes driver made an early first pit stop on lap 15. From there on Red Bull tried to extend Verstappen’s stints as long as they could, allowing him to switch to the medium tyre compound for the final stint, while Hamilton used the hards.
But as Verstappen explained afterwards he didn’t gain enough of a pace advantage from fresher tyres to be able to easily pass other cars, and even lost time catching backmarkers.
“On a day where you’re already not the quickest, I think we should have done a better job with the strategy,” he told the official F1 channel.
“The first one, okay, to be undercut there, I was not happy with it but it can happen. You get caught out. Then of course I get stuck a very long time. I lost a lot of lap time trying to fight with Lewis, fair enough.
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“Then they leave me out again thinking that we can then extract our pace, but then I get stuck behind backmarkers. They were doing quite okay lap times so for me to close in on them within two seconds, with old tyres you lose a lot of grip, so even by staying out and basically trying to create your advantage at the end, I couldn’t extract my full pace as well. So again, that was just a bad call.”
Verstappen’s longer middle stint allowed him to run a set of the medium compound tyres at the end. Although he was able to pass Charles Leclerc, who had the same compound, he tangled with Hamilton while trying to pass the Mercedes.
“We had to go back onto the medium but the tyre advantage was not that massive on a day where, first of all, the track temperature is very high, so the tyres are really hot, and as soon as you get behind cars, the tyres are overheating within two laps of…
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