Verstappen's coded messages recall previous F1 crashgate controversies

The Dutch media alleges that Perez has admitted to the team that he spun deliberately in Q3 at Monaco when he had a quicker time on the board than Verstappen but Max had every chance of beating it with his final run. Sergio, who had started the year well enough to even look like a potential title threat, started third, ahead of Max, and went on to win the race when the front row Ferraris were torpedoed by higgledy-piggledy strategy.

Max, by broadcasting that radio message, will have known it would all come out and that his team principal potentially had ‘Crashgate 3’ on his hands. Verstappen and Horner were still trending on Twitter 12 hours later.

Crashgate 1: Michael Schumacher at Monaco

For those of you relatively new to the sport, Crashgate 1 came when Michael Schumacher did a similar thing in qualifying at Monaco in 2006. After mucking up his final Q3 run, he contrived the most totally unbelievable ‘straight-on’ moment at the slow-speed Rascasse before trying to reverse out of the tyres and ‘stalling.’ Alonso was three tenths up on his final run at the time and Webber, who qualified his Williams third that day, was also on course to beat Schumacher’s time.

The post-qualifying press conference started quietly enough, until French journalist Anne Giuntini and my British colleague Byron Young, got stuck in to Michael.

Giuntini’s question said that other drivers’ opinions were that he had crashed deliberately. Schumacher attempted to bat that away by claiming that Monaco is quite tricky, as Alonso and Webber looked daggers at him from either side.

You had to have a giggle eight years on when, at Monaco again, Nico Rosberg went straight on at Mirabeau on his final Q3 run, bringing out a yellow flag and preventing Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton from beating his pole position. Keke, presumably, went in search of the nearest sand-hill to bury himself in… Nico’s incident, however, never really escalated to true crashgate status. He got the benefit of any doubt, kept his pole and won the race. Probably as much down to his clean reputation as anything. Nico, surely, wouldn’t do that!?

Truth told, such things were hardly new. The late Charlie Whiting himself, the ultimate poacher turned gamekeeper, acknowledged that you always needed to get a quick lap in early at Monaco, because someone else would, then they’d pit and overfill the oil tank…

Crashgate 2: Nelson Piquet Jr at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix

Crashgate 2, Nelson Piquet Jr’s at Singapore in 2008 became a huge scandal. Schumacher was perhaps not wrong about Briatore and this was a Flavio-orchestrated attempt – successful as it turned out – to have the race neutralised after Fernando Alonso had made an unfeasibly early stop. Fernando, of course, went on to win. The background story though, was that Renault had threatened to pull out if the team didn’t win a race in ’08, and this was the way they did it. If you’ve got hundreds of employees all with kids and mortgages, perhaps you could argue that it all added up to the most constructive use of Nelson Jr! But then, irony of irony, they won the very next race, in Japan, on merit…

The problem was that Briatore was guilty of two not-so-bright political misadventures. The first being to dramatically hack-off FIA President Max Mosley, the second being to fire Piquet Jr a year later! When Nelson blabbed it was manna for Max and both Briatore and his technical chief Pat Symonds found themselves drummed out of the sport for five years. And Renault was publicly slated and gone by the end of the following year anyway.

Christian Horner was around for all of those moments and you can only imagine what he was thinking as the little public spat was played out over the radio. ‘Max, for Lord’s sake, STFU,’ was probably right up there…

It wasn’t long before Tweets with videos highlighting Checo’s throttle inputs and engine note out of Portier were all over the internet as poor Christian tried to focus attention on Red Bull’s relative lack of pace in Brazil. You’d have to hope that Checo, like Nico, is given the benefit of the doubt and that this doesn’t all get silly.