All hot and bothered
British GP
Hungarian GP
IN THE NARRATIVE OF THE championship, this is where it got a little ugly, at Silverstone where the long-predicted on-track clash between title combatants Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton finally happened and in Hungary where a misjudgement from Hamilton’s team-mate Valtteri Bottas inadvertently took Red Bull out of contention.
There was an intriguing backstory to it all, a case study in how the competitive paranoia built by the close contest between Red Bull-Honda and Mercedes throughout the season had infiltrated all those organisations, just fuelling the fire. The contact between Verstappen and Hamilton at Copse Corner on the first lap of the British Grand Prix, which put Verstappen into a massive 51g impact with the barriers, was the almost inevitable crescendo to those building tensions.
It didn’t stop there, of course. Red Bull was furious about a Silverstone damage bill it estimated at £1.3m, which in the era of the cost cap is money that cannot be spent on making the car faster. It lodged with the FIA a petition to review the incident, which was heard during the Hungarian GP weekend and thrown out. It was against that backdrop that the Bottas incident then incurred yet more Red Bull expense – and a destroyed power unit.
First, there’s the
