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Max Verstappen does not believe it is valid to compare his clash with Lewis Hamilton to past Formula 1 moves he has made, despite parallels being drawn since the British Grand Prix controversy.
Hamilton tried to overtake Verstappen into Copse at Silverstone after drawing almost side-by-side just before the corner entry, but understeered into the Red Bull’s right rear well as Verstappen moved ahead on the outside.
In the wake of their collision at Silverstone two prior Verstappen clashes – and the Red Bull response to them – were widely cited for comparison.
One was last year’s Portuguese Grand Prix, where in practice Verstappen and Lance Stroll collided at the fast Turn 1 right-hander when Verstappen tried to pass him on the inside and Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said: “If that was a race, we would have said that Max was alongside him on the inside and therefore the corner belonged to him.”
Another was Verstappen’s aggressive pass on Hamilton at the first corner of this year’s Spanish Grand Prix, which Horner said would have ended with “both drivers in the fence” if Hamilton had not moved out of the way.
Verstappen has dismissed the incidents as invalid comparisons, though.
“That’s practice where some guy closes a lap and the other one starts a lap,” Verstappen told The Race in relation to the Stroll incident.
“And it’s practice, not a race, so of course you cannot compare these things.
“Barcelona no you cannot compare because it was a braking zone, where I just outbraked him, and just carried more speed in.
“It was just a good, clean outbraking move. But of course in Copse normally you don’t brake and it’s a flat-out corner. It’s easy to misjudge your entry speed.”
The Portuguese GP clash with Stroll has become a popular point of contrast because it is a higher speed corner and Horner’s comments at the time were effectively the same argument that Mercedes made to defend Hamilton at Silverstone.
But Horner has claimed they are “very different incidents”.
“The incident with Lance, that was a driver who was deemed to be on a slow-down lap and Max was starting a fast lap,” he said this week.
“We’d expect that the team had informed him and obviously there was an element of confusion and it was in practice.
“I don’t think Lance even knew that Max was there. It wasn’t the first lap of a grand prix and it was different circumstances so I don’t think that the two are comparable in that respect.”
Given Verstappen and his team have remained consistent in their view that he was not at fault for the incident and Hamilton was entirely to blame, shrugging off the comparisons to past incidents comes as little surprise.
Verstappen was adamant ahead of the Hungary weekend that the British GP clash was because of a misjudgement on Hamilton’s part and he felt he had no role to play on the outside, as he had left enough room.
“I will continue to race like I did,” he told The Race. “I felt like I didn’t do anything wrong in that fight.
“I gave him more than enough space but he completely misjudged the cornering speeds, and especially the angle he went into that corner there was no way he was going to make the corner with the speed he entered it.
“When you go so close to the inside wall, on the entry to Copse and then still try to do the same speed as I am doing while opening up the corner again and then giving him more than a car width space, you’re going to run out of road.
“But this time of course he ran into my right rear and caused me to hit the wall.
“I was very well aware of course where I was positioning my car and I also know that if he goes in with such a tight angle, from entry to mid to the exit you have to open up the corner, to give him the space. But clearly he still ran out of space.
“So, from my side I continue to race like I did. And I think he will also learn from what happened there.”
