The 1996 F1 World Champion spoke at length about Max Verstappen’s tactics in the Mexico City Grand Prix, in which the reigning World Champion picked up two separate time penalties over his battles with title rival Lando Norris.
Verstappen received two separate time penalties at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez – one for pushing Norris wide at Turn 4, and a separate one for going off track and gaining an advantage after diving up the inside of Norris at Turn 7 moments later.
The tactics from Verstappen were noted by Norris as showing his willingness to “sacrifice” himself to beat his title rival, rather than concerning himself with securing the best possible result – a change in mindset as the championship reaches its closing stages.
Verstappen’s driving was defended by Red Bull team boss Christian Horner following the race in Mexico, and Damon Hill believes some responsibility must be shouldered by the team to ensure their driver has the correct attitude.
“There’s never any attempt to publicly describe his driver in a way that other people would recognise as being… it’s always a protective comment from Christian about Max,” Hill told the Sky F1 podcast.
“So Max, it appears as though Max is free to do whatever he likes – his team will never criticise the way he drives.
“I think, if you’re in a competition, that’s probably fine to do that publicly, but really at some point there has to be a conversation. It’s the responsibility of the team to also contribute to the driver’s attitude.”
Hill, as a former teammate of the late Ayrton Senna – one of the first drivers to take aggressive tactics to the extreme by taking out title rival Alain Prost at the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix – acknowledged Verstappen’s choices are nothing new.
“Ayrton was one of the drivers who changed the way that drivers went about racing, in the sense that he was a very aggressive driver,” he said.
“He defended vigorously, and sometimes he ‘attacked from behind’… if you want to put it that way!
!He could also take matters into his own hands if he didn’t think the stewards or the FIA were doing the right thing. I’m thinking of Prost in Suzuka in 1990.
!There was controversy about the way Ayrton drove.”
Hill also pointed to a previous example from the 1979 French Grand Prix, and a famous battle between Ferrari’s Gilles Villeneuve and Renault’s Rene Arnoux, as indicative of just how far drivers can take a fight if a governing body doesn’t intervene.
“If you go back to the battle between Villeneuve and Arnoux at Dijon, you might argue that is an example of drivers taking matters into their own hands,” he said.
“They didn’t come on the radio – they didn’t have radios – Rene Arnoux didn’t get on the radio and say, ‘Hey, he pushed me off’. You know?
“They just got their fists out and started bashing into each other. They decided that this was a great race, you know, they both loved it. They both came out afterward going, ‘This was a really good fun battle’, but of course, someone could have got killed, you know?
“And so the FIA’s job is to say, ‘Hang on a minute, guys, it’s very entertaining, but we’re worried that one of you is going to have a terrible accident, and we don’t want to see that, so we’re going to have to stop that excessive kind of driving’.
“This is the balancing act. What do we want from the sport? We want the battles. We love the close, wheel-to-wheel action. We love the audacious pass. We love all that.
“We don’t want to see just people bashing into each other to what is effectively a foul in the penalty box. That’s really what it is, isn’t it, when you’ve got an overtake attempt.”
Hill revealed that, when he entered the world of car racing in the late 1980s, he was “appalled” by the ethos of settling a championship via a crash, as such tactics were unthinkable in the motorbike world in which he had started off.
“Motorcycle racing, they didn’t use to barge into each other, largely because you’d be both on the deck,” he said.
“But car racing, the way to settle a championship was to crash into the guy who’d got fewer points than you.
“The result stood. I never got that. I just thought, surely they should penalise that. But I didn’t come from karting, and I don’t know what the etiquette is in karting.
“I get the sense from talking to people that this is seen as fair in love and war, you can miss your braking point and take a bloke out.”
