It’s impossible to ignore the context for all this, on both sides.
For Verstappen, this incident came at the end of a long, hard season which has been his most impressive on a number of different levels.
He won the championship with two races remaining despite having a car that was fastest only for the first five grands prix, and he did it by driving with a consistent excellence that no-one was able to match. Everyone in F1 – including Russell – acknowledges that.
As Alonso put it on Thursday: “When I saw the car being the third, the fourth fastest car sometimes… when I saw McLaren win one-twos in one of the races before summer… in Zandvoort, Lando won with 25 seconds over the second or something like that… I thought, OK, the championship will be, tight until Abu Dhabi. But then it was not tight because one driver was outstanding.”
At the same time, Verstappen has been holding together a team that at times has looked like it was falling apart at the seams.
It started with allegations of sexual harassment levelled at team principal Christian Horner, which he has always denied and of which he has been cleared by two internal investigations.
Verstappen’s father Jos has been at loggerheads with Horner as a result of the allegations. They are rubbing along well enough at the moment, but Horner knows both Verstappens have to be treated with care.
Max has also faced the resignation of the greatest designer in F1 history, Adrian Newey, at least partly as a result of the allegations against Horner. And the departures of two other senior figures with whom he has worked closely for nearly a decade.
And he has led his team from the front through something close to a crisis with their car performance during the summer, and out the other side, culminating in his brilliant, cathartic, career-defining and essentially title-winning victory in the wet in Brazil from 17th on the grid.
Russell, meanwhile, as a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, is at the forefront of the drivers’ attempts get the FIA to rewrite the rules governing racing, a move that was triggered by Verstappen’s driving against Norris in the US Grand Prix.
After Verstappen defended his lead in Austin with his trademark ‘dive-bomb’ defence – ensuring he complied with the rules by being ahead at the apex, but taking both cars off track on the exit, a move he used multiple times against Lewis Hamilton in 2021 – the drivers had had enough.
To a man, they like Verstappen as a person and respect him as a driver. But as Verstappen put it himself in a BBC Sport interview in Las Vegas: “How I am on the track is not necessarily how I am off-track. I know on track, if you want to win, if you want to be a champion, you do need to be on the limit.”
And to many of his fellow drivers, Verstappen can drive in extremis in a manner they do not find acceptable.
The Austin incident was followed by a drivers’ meeting in Mexico a week later in which the vast majority of the drivers made it clear they wanted the racing rules rewritten in a manner that no longer implicitly allowed, even encouraged, the dive-bomb defence.
After that meeting, Russell said 19 of the 20 drivers were “aligned on where it needs to be”. He didn’t say who the exception was. He didn’t need to.
Two days later, at the Mexico City Grand Prix, Verstappen went even more extreme in his driving against Norris, earning himself two separate 10-second penalties for two different moves on one lap.
Russell said on Thursday: “Lewis is the champion I aspire to be – hard but fair, never beyond the line.
“I am not losing any sleep over it. I never had any intention of speaking out and speaking like this but he has gone too far with this personal attack and I am putting the truth out there and returning the favour.”
There is one more added dimension. Their dispute also revives the dispute between their two teams, which has lain largely dormant since the bitter title battle between Verstappen and Hamilton in 2021.
After Horner called Russell “hysterical” in Qatar, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff decided he should get in on the act. Wolff, unusually, attended Russell’s news conference on Thursday, and indicated to a journalist he was keen to be asked a question, too.
He took a swipe at Horner: “Why does he feel entitled to comment about my driver? Yapping little terrier, always something to say.”
