Windsor sees 'classic karting' from Verstappen: 'Was exactly what happened'

Peter Windsor thinks Max Verstappen deliberately pushed Charles Leclerc slightly off track at the first corner. The Red Bull Racing driver's action has been labelled 'classic karting'.

"He was alongside Charles for a millisecond in the braking area as they went into the tight left-hand first corner, and you could just see what Max was doing," Windsor said in a new video on his YouTube channel. "It's classic karting.  He's got such a good racing brain as you can see him thinking 'well I'm going to go for it here down the inside with Charles, if I run wide of course, I'm going to have a bit of understeer, it's not my fault, cold tyres and everything else'."

The analyst suspects that Verstappen went too wide on purpose and that in principle, he could have just made it through the corner. "I think he just wanted to make sure Charles was never going to get him and he just eased off the steering." In the end, the stewards gave Verstappen five seconds, but he seemed to have little problem with that.

Verstappen on mediums

"He knew that going into the first pit stop, but in that first stint he didn't really show any aggression or try to get away from Charles. On the contrary after about five or six laps his tyres started to go away," said Windsor, who saw that the RB19 on mediums was not going so well on the Las Vegas Street Circuit.

In the press conference, Verstappen was asked why. Why didn't things really want to flow in that first stint on the yellow-cheeked tyre? "Yes, I don't know. Right now we have to analyse why that was, because in the long runs they were fine in free practice," said the three-time world champion.