Racing at any level requires mutual trust between each of the drivers and their competitors. In F1 these drivers are pushing 1,800-pound projectiles up to 200 miles per hour and it would be tantamount to attempted murder to hurl one at another driver with intent. Any driver found to be using their car as a weapon of purposeful assault should instantly be stripped of any motivation to carry on driving in such a manner. I contend that Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen likely pushed his car into the side of George Russell’s Mercedes on Sunday at the Spanish Grand Prix on purpose. This is serious.
By precedent set when Michael Schumacher was excluded from the 1997 F1 championship for intentionally ramming Jacques Villeneuve, it’s time for 27-year-old Dutch four-time World Champion Max Verstappen to receive some consequences for his actions. The FIA should do more than slap his wrist with a 10-second penalty. Verstappen should have all of the 137 points he has earned thus far in the season revoked. I would possibly even recommend excluding him from the championship altogether for the remainder of the 2025 season.
Max Verstappen has shown a history of violence in his race car, and the series needs to take this seriously in order to avoid eroding its reputation further. It is quite obvious that Verstappen is a generational talent, but he’s also prone to tantrums when things aren’t going his way, and needs to receive some consequences for his actions, particularly this latest one.
Wait, what happened?
In case you didn’t watch Sunday’s Grand Prix, you missed a big Max Verstappen meltdown. While the Dutchman looked on for a podium finish after a long and arduous pit-lane battle with the Ferraris and Mercedes, a late race full course yellow bunched up the field and gave Max an opportunity to pit for a set of tires without losing position. Because Max was already on a three-stop strategy, the only new set of tires he had on hand were the white-sidewall hard compound. “Mate, what the **** is this tire?” the defending champion called on the radio once his pitstop ended. And that’s when it all unraveled.
Coming back to green Max tried to get his tires to fire up so he could defend against an attacking Charles Leclerc and George Russell behind. Accelerating onto the main straight Verstappen’s tires spun up and he nearly lost the car at corner exit, killing his momentum for the long run down to turn one. Leclerc pounced at the opportunity and easily passed Max with a minor side-to-side touch. Russell then dove down the inside of Verstappen at turn one and the two cars made tire-to-tire contact, with Max choosing to run his car off the circuit to avoid further contact, accelerating and re-passing the Mercedes off-piste.
Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase advised his driver to slow and allow Russell back past him into fourth position. Presumably the idea here was to cover off a potential penalty for overtaking off the track, while lobbying for Russell to receive a penalty for initiating the contact in the first place. Instead, Verstappen blew a gasket and yelled at Lambiase every excuse under the sun. Verstappen slowed, appearing to let George past, but then at the last second lunged his car directly into the side of the Mercedes.
The Schumacher precedent
Fittingly also in Spain at the Jerez circuit for the finale of the 1997 season, Schumacher was leading the championship by a single point going into the race over Canadian Jacques Villeneuve. On lap 48 it became clear that Villeneuve would overtake Schumacher and win the title by winning the Grand Prix, and as Villeneuve moved to pass Schumacher abruptly turned in on the Williams. Thankfully the hit didn’t end Villeneuve’s race, he scored four points and took the title, but it did put an end to Schumacher’s 1997 season. Race stewards did not initially apply any penalty to Schumacher, presumably agreeing that by failing to finish the grand prix, the German driver had self-penalized.
Two weeks after the event FIA President Max Mosely announced that Schumacher would be disqualified from the entirety of the 1997 Drivers’ Championship. An FIA disciplinary hearing found that Schumacher’s “maneuver was an instinctive reaction and although deliberate not made with malice or premeditation, it was a serious error.”
There are many parallels here between Schumacher’s case and Verstappen’s, and I think similar action needs to be taken in order to make a stand for driver safety and against Verstappen’s erratic driving. The big difference between Verstappen and Schumacher is that Michael was willing to resort to this kind of behavior in order to win a world championship, while Max employs these tactics in a fight over fourth position while 50 points out of the championship fight with 15 rounds remaining in the season.
This isn’t the first time Max has used his car as a weapon against his fellow drivers. In 2024 alone Verstappen showed his driving violence by shoving into Lando Norris at the Austrian Grand Prix and the Mexico City Grand Prix before threatening to put George Russell’s head through the wall over a minor penalty in Qatar. It absolutely must stop. The FIA has an opportunity to make an example of Verstappen, but instead it’ll probably continue to do nothing until he seriously injures someone or worse.