According to Steiner on The Red Flags Podcast, Russell admitted he was using the former team principal as a bit of inspiration when carrying out his spat with Verstappen.
The strain of a long Formula 1 season saw Max Verstappen and George Russell at their wits’ end in Qatar, with the two drivers engaging in a war of words via the media that lasted into the Abu Dhabi season finale.
The two men traded verbal blows over a complex incident in qualifying. Verstappen and Russell were both on slow laps, but Russell approached Verstappen at a much higher rate of speed.
The Mercedes driver was forced to take evasive action and radioed his team to inform them that he felt Verstappen’s move was dangerous.
The reigning World Champion was hit with a one-place grid penalty that effective swapped him and Russell in the starting lineup. But in the stewards’ room after qualifying, things got heated.
Russell claimed that Verstappen threatened to put the other driver head-first into the wall, which encouraged Russell to call out Verstappen publicly for being a “bully.” Then, in response, Verstappen called Russell a liar.
The spat went so far that, during the pre-finale dinner in Abu Dhabi, Russell moved an empty seat next to Verstappen so that he could sit beside Hamilton instead.
Ask Guenther Steiner, though, and the whole fiasco was poorly handled on Russell’s end.
In the Red Flags podcast, Guenther Steiner denied one of his co-host’s assertions that Russell had enjoyed the moral high ground at the time.
“[George] didn’t look the smartest guy there — to pick a fight with Max in front of the stewards, because Max milked that one,” Steiner said.
“And normally George is not that kind of guy.”
By “milked,” it’s likely that Steiner is referring to the fact that Verstappen didn’t hesitate to retaliate against Russell publicly, in the media, in a battle that carried out over several weekends.
Russell had insisted at the time that he was standing up to a bully in Verstappen — and one of Steiner’s co-hosts on the Red Flags podcast challenged the former Haas boss on that front: Don’t you believe in standing up to bullies?
“I believe in standing up to bullies,” Steiner assured them, “but let somebody else do the dirty work for you.”
Steiner pointed out the fact that Toto Wolff got involved in the fiasco, arguably giving the whole affair more gravitas than it needed.
He also shared a quick story about a run-in Steiner had with Russell in Abu Dhabi.
“He said, ‘Yeah, I just did like you would be doing,’ because I made a comment, you know,” Steiner said. “And he just said, ‘Oh, I’m just doing what you normally do there.'”
But Steiner argues that he would never have gone directly for Verstappen.
“I would have picked a fight with the stewards, not with Max Verstappen,” he said.
The stewards would have perhaps been the easier target, particularly in a season that had been soaked with allegations of bias and variable interpretations of the rules.
Russell, then, was apparently interpreting the Gunether Steiner attitude a bit differently than Steiner himself would have.
For what it’s worth, Verstappen has claimed that he and Russell spoke after the race in Abu Dhabi, and that they’ve smoothed things over ahead of 2025.
