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Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has dismissed claims the “sparky” radio exchanges between Max Verstappen and his race engineer are manufactured to spice up the F1 show.
Following qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix on Friday, Verstappen apologised to Gianpiero Lambiase for his rant during the session that included the use of the f-word on three occasions.
During Sunday’s main race, Verstappen and Lambiase endured a number of testy moments despite another routine victory for the Dutch driver who rose from sixth on the grid to take the chequered flag by 22.3secs over team-mate Sergio Perez.
An initial exchange saw Lambiase urge Verstappen to ‘use his head’ after moving up to second position behind Perez, to which the 25-year-old replied: “Are we both (he and Perez) doing it or what?”
Lambiase then told Verstappen to “just follow my instruction”, drawing an angry response of “I want to know if both cars do it.”
Having the final word, Lambiase retorted: “Max, please just follow my instruction, thank you.”
Later in the race, following Verstappen’s second pit stop, Lambiase was again forced to take to the radio to express unhappiness his driver had too quickly degraded his tyres. A second warning followed as Verstappen set what was at the time the fastest lap.
When Verstappen suggested a further pit stop to give his crew “some extra pit-stop training”, Lambiase replied: “No, not this time!”
There was a post-race feeling that some of the exchanges are made up to breathe a degree of life into what have become routine victories for Verstappen.
Horner, however, has categorically refuted such a proposition. He said: “Absolutely not! There’s nothing along those lines.
“GP (Lambiase) and Max have been together since the first race Max stepped into the car. Max is a very demanding customer, he’s hungry for everything, and you’ve got to be a strong character to deal with that.
“GP, he’s our Jason Statham equivalent, or certainly lookalike, and he does a very good job in managing Max during the course of a grand prix weekend or qualifying.
“He deals with him firmly but fairly, and there’s mutual trust and respect between the two. That comes out of the mutual trust that you must have with an engineer.
“The only problem is, that conversation between the two of them, there are 200 million people listening, but there’s a great bond and a great trust between the two of them.”
Horner has suggested Verstappen’s forcefulness and demands would result in “many race engineers crumbling under that pressure”.
“GP has got the strength of character to deal with that,” added Horner, who feels Verstappen can often be taking situations far easier than Lambiase might think.
“I think there’s sometimes an element of that,” said Horner.
“What you have to remember is the engineers, or the performance engineers, they’re living and breathing all the data they have in front of them.
“They know their driver’s driving style, they know what they’re taking out of the car, and so on.
“I know what he (Verstappen) was doing. He was trying to build a gap up for a pitstop, and GP said ‘Look, I think he’s taking it pretty easy. All the metrics are massively under control’.
“So it’s having that trust and bond that’s so important, which is what those two guys have.
“Sometimes it gets a bit sparky between the two of them, and Max is the kind of character that will rev very quickly, but it’ll come down very quickly. GP doesn’t forget so quickly.”
