Andrea Stella delivers scathing Max Verstappen criticism and points to Lewis Hamilton incident

Andrea Stella on the pit wall

A furious McLaren boss Andrea Stella raised the example of Max Verstappen in Sao Paulo 2021 and suggested that led to his contact with Lando Norris in Austria.

Stella saw his team lose out on a potential victory when Verstappen hit Norris in lap 64, sending the McLaren man out and handing the Dutchman a 10-second penalty, and said the FIA should have done more to draw a clear line on this kind of contact.

Andrea Stella takes aim at Red Bull and Max Verstappen after Austria crash

Speaking after he exited McLaren’s pit wall, Stella immediately raised the example of Sao Paulo 2021 in which Verstappen made contact with Lewis Hamilton in a similar fashion but it was a move that was ultimately not investigated by race control.

“I see that the entire population in the world know who is responsible except for a group of people [Red Bull],” Stella said via Sky F1. “But the problem behind it is that if you don’t address these things, honestly, they will come back.

“They have come back today because they were not addressed properly in the past when there were some fights with Lewis. That needed to be punished in a harsher way like this. You learn how to race in a certain way, which we can consider fair and square.

“[There have been] many episodes. The fact is that we have so much respect for Red Bull, so much respect for Max. They don’t need to do this. They don’t need to do this as a way to almost compromise your reputation. Why would you do that?”

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Challenged that it was aggressive racing, akin to Michael Schumacher who Stella worked with at Ferrari, the now McLaren boss said the stewards had already decided who was at fault.

“The stewards found that Max was fully to blame in this episode,” he continued. “So it’s not about racing in a driver’s way, it’s about racing within the regulations and the regulations must be enforced in a way that is effective because when a car is out of the race as a consequence of this accident, the punishment needs to be proportionate to the outcome.

“And we had before the incident, twice moving under braking. So I think it’s just evident we have to enforce the way to go racing because we want to have fun and we want to enjoy.”