© LAT Photographic for Williams F1
Damon Hill left Christian Horner with nothing to say other than to scold Hill that “rather than criticising Max” he should be “encouraging him”.
The FIA have decided to let Max Verstappen off the hook for intentionally going wide and pushing Lewis Hamilton off the track at the Brazilian Grand Prix.
Many drivers and other Formula 1 personalities have warned that this means overtaking from the outside is going to be almost impossible if drivers are allowed to push each other out and go unpunished.
1996 Formula 1 champion Damon Hill faced Red Bull team boss Christian Horner with these facts. Here is their full exchange on Sky Sports F1.
Hill: “Who is left with the impression now that it is okay to dive down the inside, use all the road and not let anybody come back on the track? Where are we with the driving standards? My personal view is Max was over the limit in Brazil and now it’s sort of unclear where we are going to be.”
Horner: “I don’t think it is. Do you think Bottas was over the limit? Do you think on the first lap Sainz was over the limit? They are all incidents and similar things happened. There is so much scrutiny placed because it is the two World Championship protagonists going for it.
“Max clearly demonstrated in Mexico you can pass around the outside. A clean pass into Turn 1 around the outside. I think what you had in Brazil was Lewis in a vastly superior car, straight-line speed wise, Max hanging on for 58 laps. The fact he hung on for that long, nobody else could manage more than three against Lewis…Max was braking right on the limit and so was Lewis.
“If he had done what Checo did on the first lap, he would have undercut him and let Max go wide, so I don’t quite understand why you are being so hard on Max…And neither does your former technical director by the way [Adrian Newey, who was a chief designer, not a TD, at Williams while Hill was driving there].
[SilverArrows.Net Comment: Wow, Horner is using Hill’s former business and personal relationship with Newey as a part of his argument here. Just wow.]
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Hill: “Well I was a racing driver but I’m looking at it from a point of view of you want to go racing and you know you have got a hard charger in Max and you are uncompromising as a race team. But we want to know, as people who love the sport, how it is going to be conducted and played out when it comes to the crunch. Basically we’re going to have another pretty close at this track.
Horner: “It’s going to be hard racing, but we want it to be fair racing. We want it to be dealt with on the circuit and not in the stewards’ room.”
Horner then went on to scold Hill for not supporting Verstappen because, according to him, “the sport has been crying out” for someone to put Mercedes “under pressure”.
Horner: “We want a fair playing field and a fair clean fight. We’ve had a phenomenal Championship, the fact we are still here. Mercedes haven’t had this pressure, that’s why Toto is getting twitchy, that’s why he is swearing at the camera, that’s why he is throwing a few F-bombs around…
“And it’s fantastic. We’ve got them under pressure and it’s what the sport has been crying out for. Rather than criticising Max, you should be encouraging him.”
[SilverArrows.Net Comment: Horner’s ultimate argument seems to be: ‘it’s ok to break the rules, because we want Mercedes to lose’. You couldn’t make this up.]
