"What's incredible is he's got so much capacity to have that conversation. It's like he's on a Sunday afternoon drive!"
Sunday 16 August 2020 17:52, UK
Christian Horner says he has no issues with Max Verstappen's angry radio messages from the Spanish GP as it shows he's "ambitious and competitive" - while the Red Bull boss also believes his young star driver is matching Lewis Hamilton's 2020 form.
Verstappen impressively split the Mercedes on Sunday in Barcelona with both driver and team principal admitting that was the "maximum" he could have achieved, but his afternoon also included many radio rants.
"Do you want me to repeat it again? This ******* tyre is dead," said Verstappen during his first stint as he pleaded for an earlier stop, while he later added: "How about we just focus on our race first instead of looking to Lewis?"
Verstappen's Red Bull engineer calmly told him to "keep his head down", and Horner insisted he was fine with the Dutchman's passion.
"He obviously doesn't have the visibility of the whole picture the strategists have," Horner told Sky F1. "He's ambitious, he's competitive, and he's pushing.
"You can hear that his engineer is fairly clear with him, in terms of his instruction of what his job is and what the rest of the engineering team are up to.
"What we didn't want to do [after the first stop] was drop him back into traffic which would burn up the tyres."
Horner added: "What's incredible is he's got so much capacity to have that conversation. It's like he's on a Sunday afternoon drive!"
Verstappen, meanwhile, explained: "The first stint I was struggling with my tyres at the end so I just wanted to pit. Then I think we shouldn't really look at the strategy of the Mercedes cars, we should just do our fastest strategy."
Hamilton eventually finished 24s ahead of Verstappen, although he did stay ahead of Valtteri Bottas to remain the Englishman's closest title rival.
"Our race wasn't about Lewis today, it was about keeping Valtteri behind us," said Horner. "Max got everything he can out of the car and to split Mercedes who had a quicker car than us today, I don't think we could have got more than that.
"That was all that was there."
Verstappen is now 37 points behind Hamilton in the championship, but Horner hopes for a head-to-head battle between the 2020 stars in the coming races.
"I think they are the two in-form drivers of Formula 1, there's very little to choose between them," he added.
"It's interesting, you have Max who's 22 years of age, Lewis who's 35, they're at different stages of their career but I'm hopeful in the coming races that we see the two of them go head to head because it's what the viewers would love to see, it's what the teams would love to see and I think it would be good for Formula 1."
