Verstappen and Piastri both failed to improve on their final laps – and the Dutchman blamed that on Norris going slowly in front of him in the final sector.<\/p>\n
The incident happened on the run to the final corner, where Norris was on the inside coming into the pits as Verstappen sought to complete his lap.<\/p>\n
His engineer Gianpiero Lambiase said “you can thank your mate for that” – a reference to the friendship between Verstappen and Norris.<\/p>\n
Verstappen, who looked angry about the situation in the immediate aftermath of qualifying, said: “Without that I think it would have been close for pole.”<\/p>\n
The four-time champion later added: “You need every kind of clean air that you can have on a Q3 lap, especially because you’re fully on the limit with braking and everything. And I lost a bit of downforce with that. So I went straight on.”<\/p>\n
He had calmed down by the end of the official news conference, after which he told BBC Sport: “Of course these things happen, I just hope it wasn’t deliberate.”<\/p>\n
Norris shrugged the incident off, saying “Ah, they always complain. They complain about everything. It’s Red Bull. I was like three seconds ahead or something.”<\/p>\n
Asked whether his brush with the wall on his first lap was a kiss or a hit, Russell said: “A bit more of a snog.<\/p>\n
“When you’re on a really strong lap and you just touch the wall like that, you’re a little bit tentative going into the next corner.<\/p>\n
“You just don’t know if you’ve got a puncture or the car’s just going to spin out on you. And obviously it’s a very fast corner, but all good in the end.”<\/p>\n
Russell, who crashed on Friday, added: “I had a difficult day yesterday for many reasons but it’s good to come back and get a good result today. I knew there was potential in the car.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Verstappen and Piastri both failed to improve on their final laps – and the Dutchman blamed that on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-61253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}