2021 Italian GP : Post-Race comments from Max Verstappen and Christian Horner

Red Bull hopes of winning 2021 Italian Grand Prix was undone by poor pit-stop by team and inevitable crash between championship rivals Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen ended their hopes of podium.

Max Verstappen’s collision with Lewis Hamilton on lap 25 ended both championship rivals race. While Verstappen’s team mate Sergio Perez comes home in P3 ahead of Valtteri Bottas but the Mexican was handed 5 seconds time penalty by race stewards for overtaking Ferrari man Charles Leclerc off the track.

The time penalty pushes Perez to P5, two place down from where he finished the race. Overall it’s a bad weekend for Red Bull, they managed to score only 10 points after starting the race from pole position.

With both front runners taking DNF, the gap between them remains five points after round 14 in Monza. While Mercedes increases it’s advantage in the constructors battle to 18 points over Red Bull.

Max Verstappen was handed three place grid drop penalty by Italian GP race stewards for causing the collision with Lewis Hamilton. That means Verstappen will start Russian GP, three places down from where ever he qualifies.

Max Verstappen (DNF)

“We were racing for position today but you need two people to work together to make the corner and Lewis just kept squeezing until there wasn’t room anymore for two cars and that’s when we crashed.

When he exited the pits, he started to squeeze me going into Turn 1 so I had to use the green part of the track. It was very tight but there was room for me to go around the outside and then I was pushed onto the orange sausage kerb. I was there to try and race hard but fair.

I don’t fully agree with the penalty as I believe it was a racing incident. It’s very unfortunate what happened today but we are both professionals and so we will move on.”

Sergio Perez (P5)

“It was a very eventful race and a real shame to miss out on the podium. With the penalty, I think we hoped for a wider view in the sense that it was my corner and I was ahead of Charles, but it is what it is and we tried to recover.

From our side we did the best possible race we could as a Team but overtaking was impossible today and it was really difficult to keep ahead of the cars behind. McLaren were really quick and difficult to beat, they’ve been solid this weekend and especially on the straights they were hard to follow.

They had very strong traction so at no point could I be a threat to them, but as a Team this wasn’t our track, we weren’t so strong here so now we move on and look forward to Russia. There is still a long way to go in this championship.”

Christian Horner, Team Principal

“We are disappointed with the three-place grid penalty, but accept the stewards decision. We felt what happened between Max and Lewis was a genuine racing incident.

I think you can you can look at it and you can argue that one should have gone straight, you can argue that the other should have given more space. So I think when you cannot apportion blame, you’d have to say it’s 50-50. And so I think from our perspective, from my perspective, it’s a racing incident.”