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Red Bull increasingly unpopular in England: 'Several reasons'
Red Bull Racing's home is Milton Keynes, making Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez's team somewhat British as well. In Britain, however, Red Bull seems to be able to do very little right. Especially in the past year and a half, the current constructors' world champion have not made themselves very popular. As former Formula 1 driver Karun Chandhok also sees.
Everything can be traced back to the 2021 season. Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen crashed at the Silverstone circuit and from then on the tensions increased between Red Bull and Mercedes. That also hit the fans, as many Brits are big fans of Lewis Hamilton. What happened in the following weeks, and especially of course in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, did not help matters at all.
Chandhok thinks there are several reasons. One, according to the Sky Sports analyst, is that they do not have a British driver. "Obviously they don't have a British driver and certainly in this country there was very much a feeling that it was them against Lewis and then you add George and Mercedes have got two Brits in that team. I think the old adage of, apart from Ferrari, the fans still gravitate more towards a driver than a team is still true," he said during the Autosport podcast.
What could Red Bull have said better?
According to Chandhok, Christian Horner and Helmut Marko would have been wise to state, after winning the world title with Verstappen in 2021, that they had been happy. "If they'd come out of Abu Dhabi 2021 and said 'we got lucky, we were really going to lose this championship until Latifi crashed. We got lucky but it had nothing to do with us, we didn’t impose the rules, we just did our race and we ended up winning, and that's an issue between Mercedes and the FIA to deal with and has nothing to do with us."
Red Bull would have been a lot more popular in Britain if they had chosen their words more carefully after Abu Dhabi, Chandhok said. However, after the final race of the season, the originally Austrian racing team did the opposite: they just seemed to rub it in nicely with Mercedes.
