Verstappen questions fairness of Leclerc blocking

Sam Hall
Tuesday 22 November 2022 05:00

Max Verstappen has questioned whether it would have been fair for him to have blocked Charles Leclerc in the closing stages of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

The Dutchman stormed to a dominant victory at the Yas Marina Circuit but his Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez missed out on securing second in the drivers' standings after a one-stop strategy from Leclerc trumped his two-stop plan.

Perez closed to within two seconds of the Ferrari driver in the closing stages but was unable to mount a challenge.

Asked if there was ever a call to drop back and help his team-mate, Verstappen said: "No, there was not, but also that is quite a tricky call to make.

"You also don't want to end up… of course, you can possibly block but is that fair racing?

"I think not the nicest way going out of the season, like that. And it looked like Checo was catching him enough to try and actually get a move but then he lost quite a bit of time with that bit of a fuss between… was it Pierre [Gasly] and Alex [Albon]?

"I was watching the screen. But yeah, [it was] unfortunate."

Although a dummy pit call from Ferrari caused Red Bull to bring Perez in earlier than the team would have liked, the Mexican confirmed that it was always intended that he would stop twice.

"Yeah, that was always the plan for us," said Perez.

"We, we knew we were going on to the two-stop. And by the way, we probably thought after the first stint that the deg was higher than it was really in the end, so we didn't push as much as we should on the two-stop, especially in the second stint."