MPH: Verstappen's scathing honesty is a throwback to F1's past

It’s an interesting dynamic as F1 has transitioned to the most showbiz it has ever been, with the biggest marketing push any global sport has ever seen, that its world champion just doesn’t buy into any of it and is so refreshingly honest about his distaste for anything but the racing.

There was a question to him earlier his year in Miami where a local reporter was hyping up the whole event, the venue and the race’s spectacular presence on the world stage, almost putting those words into Max’s mouth by their question. There was a moment of exasperation on his face, as if he really just wanted to say, “I really don’t care about any of that, not one word of it means a thing to me,” before he composed himself and gave a suitably bland one sentence answer. But it’s as if that steals a little bit of his soul each time he does it and he seems, of late, to be on a mission to call everything exactly as he sees it. Maybe he’s emboldened by those three consecutive titles.

Sprint races are a major part of Liberty Media’s vision in bringing the sport even greater mass appeal. Having just won Austin’s sprint race Verstappen was asked of his feelings about it. “Love it. It’s fantastic!” he said sarcastically. “If you want my honest opinion about the sprint weekends, I don’t really get excited by it. In qualifying, I just feel like once you complete qualifying, you’re a bit lost. I feel like we only need one qualifying in the weekend where you really put everything on the line and it feels great. This morning as well, like you put it on P1 but I’m like it’s a Saturday, there’s not many points anyway for the race. And besides that, like now, we’ve done this race, everyone more or less knows what’s going to happen tomorrow between all the cars in terms of pace, so that takes a bit the excitement away from it. If we wouldn’t have done today and we only had that qualifying that we had yesterday, you don’t really know what’s going to happen before the race, so everyone is very excited, turning on the TV because you don’t know and also we didn’t know. Now we know, a little bit. So…”

“It sounds like you’re a bit bored,” interjected Lewis Hamilton.

“Not bored,” he replied, “but if I would be a fan, I would just be disappointed because then you more or less know about the picture. If nothing crazy happens, you know what’s going to happen tomorrow so I find that a bit… it takes away that magic of waking up on a Sunday morning or whatever, Sunday afternoon, and you turn on the TV and you’ve had qualifying but you’re not sure which car is going to be quickest in most of the years and yeah, it takes that magic away, I find.”

A few days later he’s up there again, this time being asked about the bumps of the Circuit of the Americas track which played their part in the post-race disqualifications. Should all the cars be checked in future, he was asked. “No, I think we should just get rid of the sprint weekend, and then everyone can set up their cars normally. Because it wouldn’t have happened if we would have had a normal race weekend I think. These things only happen really, I think, when you have a sprint weekend when everything is so rushed in-between FP1 and qualifying, you think ‘uhhh I think we might be OK’. From our side, I think we went a bit too conservative, but that of course is still better than the other way….