While Max Verstappen claimed his 10th win of the season at the Belgian Grand Prix, the Red Bull star’s radio exchanges with race engineer Gianpiero ‘GP’ Lambiase continued to dominate headlines.
Having already clashed during qualifying, the pair disagreed early in Sunday night’s race after Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez pitted from the lead.
“So don’t forget Max, use your head please,” Lambiase said.
“Are we both doing it or what?” a testy Verstappen replied, to which the race engineer bluntly said: “You just follow my instruction”.
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Verstappen though wanted more clarification: “No, I want to know [if] both cars do it”.
“Max, please follow my instruction and trust it, thank you,” a clearly frustrated Lambiase said in response.
Lambiase then later criticised Verstappen for degrading his tyres too quickly as the Red Bull star set what was at the time the fastest lap.
“You used a lot of tyre on the out lap, Max,” Lambiase said.
“Not sure that was sensible… this tyre had reasonable degradation in the first stint. I’d ask you to use your head a bit more.”
Such was Verstappen’s superiority during the race though he had time to tease his race engineer over the team radio.
As Lambiase warned him about degradation and to conserve his tyres he joked that he might go faster instead – and take an extra pit-stop to give the team more pit-stop practice.
“I could also push on and we do another stop? A little bit of pit stop training,” Verstappen joked.
“No, not this time,” replied Lambiase.
Told earlier in the race to “follow my instructions, please, and respect them”, Verstappen was later told after pitting for fresh tyres that “you used a lot of the tyre on the out lap, Max. I’m not sure that was sensible”.
Verstappen took little notice but responded with a fastest lap. “I’d ask you to use your head a bit more,” said his engineer to which he replied: “I could push on and have another stop, for pit-stop training.”
“Not this time,” said Lambiase curtly, emphasising a need for caution that the champion said he had respected.
Verstappen later said he did take Lambiase’s requests on board in spite of a few awkward exchanges between the pair seeming to hint he may do the opposite.
“Yes, I did slow down a bit,” Verstappen said.
“You have to watch the tyres on this track, so that’s what we did until the end.”
These latest disagreements came after Verstappen apologised for an expletive-ridden rant aimed at Lambiase after he had barely made it through to the second qualifying session earlier in the weekend.
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“I should have just pushed two laps in a row like I said,” Verstappen opened that exchange.
Lambiase replied: “But you are through Max…”
Verstappen fired back: “I don’t give a f*** mate if I’m through in P10. Just s*** execution.”
Speaking after Sunday’s race, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner played down the exchanges and said Lambiase was the best person to handle Verstappen’s “strong character”.
“GP and Max have been together since the first race that Max stepped into the car,” Horner said.
“Max is a demanding customer and you’ve got to be a strong character to deal with that.
“GP’s our Jason Statham equivalent I guess, or certainly look-alike. He deals with him firmly but fairly and there’s a great respect between the two of them.
“And that comes out of a mutual trust that you must have… the only problem is that conversation between the two of them, there’s 200 million people listening.”
Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko, meanwhile, compared the relationship between Verstappen and Lambiase to that of an “old married couple”.
“They argued for a while about when to go. But now everything is alright again,” he told Sky Sports.
“That’s Max when he’s under pressure or when he doesn’t perform as he could because he always wants the maximum. That’s one of the traits that makes him so incredibly competitive.”
Their banter came as the 25-year-old Dutchman carved his way to a crushing 22-second victory ahead of Perez to complete a hat-trick of Belgian wins.
Red Bull boss Christian Horner described his team’s form this season as “mind blowing” after Verstappen’s latest display of dominance, romping to his eighth consecutive win and 10th of the season.
Asked about the prospects of completing an unbeaten season, Horner said: “I’m not going to project that far ahead. We’ll come back after the break and try to keep this amazing momentum going.”
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Formula One will shut down for three weeks and return at the end of August with Verstappen’s home Dutch Grand Prix, where he will seek to equal former Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel’s 2013 record of nine straight wins.
Verstappen’s 45th career victory lifted him 125 points clear of teammate Sergio Perez in the title race while in the constructors championship, Red Bull lead with 503 points to Mercedes on 247.
On Monday, Perez was second — Red Bull’s fifth one-two of the season — and he has a 40-point lead over Fernando Alonso in the standings.
Horner praised the team for their work in winning all 12 races this year.
“It’s all about team-work and everyone doing their bit,” he said. “It’s what the team has done in the first part of this year and it’s why we remain unbeaten so far. It’s mind blowing.
“We need to keep this level going, but right now everyone deserves a well-deserved break.”
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