Ferrari said they will not appeal against the stewards’ decision that the incident between Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and their driver Charles Leclerc was a racing incident, despite disagreeing with the verdict. The Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, supported the stewards, saying he believed it would have been incomprehensible to have changed the winner.
His Ferrari opposite number, Mattia Binotto, believed the stewards were wrong in choosing to take no further action but that his team would not pursue it any further, having done so fruitlessly after Sebastian Vettel took a penalty at the Canadian Grand Prix.
“We still believe this is a wrong decision,” he said. “We believe Charles was not at fault, a collision has happened and he has been forced off the track. Having said that we respect fully the decision of the stewards. They are the judges, we need to respect that, and more than that, as a Ferrari fan – and I am an ultimate Ferrari fan – I think it’s time for F1 to turn the page and look ahead.”
Binotto went on to praise Verstappen for coming back from seventh to win. “We often said we should leave drivers free to battle. So we may not be happy about the decision but we understand the fact we need to move forward,” he added. “Overall that’s good for F1. So bravo to Verstappen, he did a fantastic race today, as did Charles, but there will be new opportunities.”
Horner supported the verdict. “The stewards made absolutely the right choice,” he said. “It was fair racing, hard racing. It was what F1 should be. It would be incomprehensible if they were to change the podium after a race like that.”
Verstappen insisted he had done nothing wrong in his attempt to pass. The Dutchman, speaking before the decision was made, was adamant the incident was simply racing. “We had little contact midway through the corner,” he said. “From my side it’s racing. It’s hard racing. It’s better than just following each other and having boring racing.”
Leclerc, however, thought the move was unacceptable. The pair had gone wheel to wheel with one another on lap 68, which the Monegasque believed was tough but fair, in contrast to their clash a lap later. “I did the same thing from the first to the second lap. The only thing that changed was on the second lap there was contact, and then I had to go wide and lose time ,” he said before the decision. “I don’t think the second one was [fair].”
