Max Verstappen has never pretended he enjoys the theatre of a Formula 1 media pen, but even by his standards Suzuka was abrupt. Before he’d even settled into his Japanese Grand Prix weekend media session inside Red Bull’s hospitality, Verstappen clocked one journalist in the room and told him to leave.
It wasn’t random. The friction traces back to Abu Dhabi at the end of 2025, when the same reporter asked Verstappen whether he regretted his collision with George Russell at the Spanish Grand Prix — an incident that earned a 10-second penalty and, crucially, points left on the table. Verstappen would go on to lose the 2025 Drivers’ Championship to Lando Norris by two points. In 2026, the question has only grown sharper because the margins are, again, doing the talking.
David Coulthard, speaking on the *Up To Speed* podcast, framed it in exactly those terms. After discussing Japanese Grand Prix winner Kimi Antonelli and the nine-point advantage he’s built at the top of the standings, Coulthard used that gap as a neat piece of connective tissue back to Verstappen’s trigger point.
“That nine-point gap we’re talking about was topical at the weekend with Max Verstappen, because a journalist asked him about did he regret the contact with George Russell in Barcelona that cost him nine points,” Coulthard said. “He lost the World Championship by two points. Max reacted in a way, basically in Japan, when he saw the journalist’s face, he was like, ‘Out’, sent him away.”
Coulthard’s read was telling: sympathetic to the human reaction, sceptical about the execution — and quietly surprised the FIA didn’t take more interest.
“I see it this way. It’s probably not something that, on reflection, Max will feel good about,” Coulthard said. “Because even though he’s absolutely at right, you don’t have to answer the question, it is unusual to ask somebody to leave from that environment.
“I’m actually a little bit surprised the FIA didn’t take a stance on it. I didn’t see anything that there was any sort of reprimand. Because basically, if he was to say the word sh*t in there, he’d get fined.”
That last line landed because it cuts to the odd hierarchy F1 has built around “conduct”. The sport polices language with an almost puritan instinct, yet when the temperature rises in more meaningful ways — access, intimidation, the basic working relationship between competitors and the press — it often retreats into a shrug. Coulthard isn’t suggesting Verstappen committed a sporting offence. He’s pointing out the inconsistency: there are hard edges in the rulebook for some things, and an awkward silence for others.
From Verstappen’s side, it’s not hard to see why this particular question needles him. The Russell clash isn’t an abstract “would you do it again?” scenario; it’s a reminder that the 2025 title slipped away, and not by much. F1 drivers say they compartmentalise, but they also remember every point they’ve spilled. If Antonelli really is setting the pace early in 2026, Verstappen will feel the old pressure returning: not the generic pressure of being a champion, but the specific kind that comes when a season threatens to turn on one moment of misjudgement.
Coulthard didn’t pretend drivers are immune to that. He recalled his own experience of being on the receiving end of persistent criticism, and how quickly repeated questioning stops feeling like scrutiny and starts feeling personal.
“It’s very difficult not to take it personally,” he said, acknowledging that journalists have every right to press a point if it’s valid — but also that a driver, particularly one living in the constant feedback loop of modern F1, can only swallow so much before it comes back out as irritation. Coulthard even referenced an old barb aimed at him — that he could talk about incidents “as if he wasn’t driving the car at the time” — and admitted it shocked him enough to prompt a direct conversation. They “made peace and moved on,” he said.
That’s the subtext of Coulthard’s critique of Verstappen: the exit door is a power move, and power moves tend to echo longer than the original question. Verstappen is within his rights to refuse to engage; every driver is. But removing a journalist from the room changes the temperature. It turns a tense exchange into a statement about who belongs in the space — and it risks reframing Verstappen, fairly or not, as a driver trying to edit the conversation rather than simply decline it.
Whether Verstappen ends up regretting it, as Coulthard suspects, will depend on what happens next. If the story dies and the season stays on-track, it becomes a footnote. If tensions with the media harden — or if the title fight tightens and every past point becomes a live wire — it’ll resurface in the way these things always do: at the worst possible moment, when someone asks a question he doesn’t want to hear, and the room remembers Suzuka.
