Verstappen: Does it matter?

Verstappen went from podium contention to tenth on the grid in a matter of minutes after the restart of the Spanish Grand Prix following a Safety Car deployed to clear Kimi Antonelli's broken-down Mercedes.

And two parties can take credit for that: Red Bull Racing's pitwall, who decided to pit their driver and put him on Hards!!!!!

And then there was Verstappen himself, who decided to ram George Russell in Turn 5 when his race engineer asked him to cede a position he kept while going off track fighting with the Mercedes driver, something the reigning Formula 1 champion disagreed with.

As a result, Verstappen was rightfully slapped with a ten-second time penalty that demoted him to tenth, and was also given two penalty points on his license which put him one point away from a race ban as he now has 11.

Speaking after the race, he was asked by Sky Sports F1 to comment on his incident with Russell; he simply responded: "Does it matter?

"Yeah, OK. That's great. I prefer to speak about the race rather than one single moment," the reluctant Red Bull Racing driver added when pressed for an answer. "If there are any. I think we are way too slow to fight for the title. That was clear again today.

"We tried to do a three-stop and that was quite good but we also needed it because we had quite a bit of degradation on the tyres.

"Unfortunately, the Safety Car came out at the end and we ran out of tyres to use and the hard tyre was not the right tyre.

"When you only have six laps to go, everyone can go flat out and you are severely grip limited on the hard," he explained.

Red Bull Racing always had the option to keep Verstappen out under the Safety Car, and when asked if that would've been a better option, the Dutchman said: "Fresh tyres make quite a bit of a difference.

"No one really expected the hard tyre would be so poor. Maybe it would have been better to stay out but that's a lot easier to say now," he maintained.

But then Verstappen was asked whether his incident with Russell affected his image; he coldly responded: "Is it? That's your opinion."

An interesting fact emerged that would make the post-race Red Bull Racing debrief quite tasty: the fact that the FIA did not think Verstappen should've given the position back to Russell, as clearly shown in their document 39 of which there is a screengrab below.

Red Bull did not believe their driver when he said he did nothing wrong, while the FIA did...