Max Verstappen has mocked Ferrari’s failures in unseen footage which was recorded last season but has only just surfaced now. The Red Bull star aimed a dig at Ferrari’s strategy department after the reigning champion benefited from failures.
The clip is featured in a new documentary for Dutch broadcaster Viaplay, ‘Max Verstappen: Anatomy of a Champion’. In the show, Verstappen checks the weather on his phone ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix.
After taking a look at the forecast, he says: “Rain Friday, Saturday.” Producers then ask: “Better if it’s wet, no?”
But Verstappen quickly responded: “More chaos. But in the dry, Ferrari has more options to f*** up the strategies.” Verstappen had taken advantage of Ferrari’s errors in the two races leading up to the Grand Prix.
In France, Leclerc crashed out while under pressure in the race lead which handed victory to the Dutchman. Next in Hungary, Ferrari made a cataclysmic tyre call as they stopped Leclerc for hard tyres, dropping him back to P6 despite having been leading.
The mistake allowed Verstappen to rack up another race win en-route to his record-breaking total of 15 victories last year. Earlier in the season, Ferrari had already cost Leclerc points after bad calls at the Monaco and British Grands Prix.
Meanwhile, the Monegasque also missed out on a potential podium finish in Imola after a late crash at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. Ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix, Verstappen’s father Jos had also reacted to the Prancing Horse’s mistakes.
He told Motorsport.com: “Red Bull’s decisions are not always good, it’s true. But they make fewer mistakes than Ferrari, that’s why Max [Verstappen] has an 80-point lead over Leclerc.”
Red Bull dominated the campaign last season with Verstappen clinching his second world title as early as the Japanese Grand Prix. Over the winter, Mattia Binotto was axed as Ferrari team principal in a bid to get the team back on track.
New team boss Frederic Vasseur immediately removed strategist Inaki Rueda out of the firing line with Ravin Jain taking over. Ex-F1 champion Damon Hill suggested Ferrari’s mistakes in 2022 were almost as important to the championship’s eventual destiny as Verstappen’s skill.
He said: “I think it’s very difficult to actually decide whether it’s Red Bull and Max’s brilliance this season, an almost perfect performance, or whether it was Ferrari shooting themselves in the foot.
“It was a lamentable at times performance from them because they showed so much promise at the beginning and between the team strategy and a few driver errors and basically lacking the ability to move forward with that car they didn’t provide a challenge to Max.”
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