Ted Kravitz: ‘Robbed’ line was clipped, Verstappen talks cleared the air after Sky boycott
Ted Kravitz has lifted the lid on the Red Bull/Sky Sports freeze-out that exploded in Mexico 2022, insisting his much-debated “robbed” remark about Lewis Hamilton in Abu Dhabi 2021 was stripped of context and turned into something it wasn’t.
Speaking about the fallout, Kravitz says he wasn’t accusing Max Verstappen or Red Bull of any wrongdoing — and that a face-to-face with Verstappen, his father Jos and the team put the issue to bed.
“I think I’d expressed a commonly held viewpoint in Formula One that Lewis Hamilton had been robbed of an eighth world championship in Abu Dhabi. That was not a rogue view at the time,” Kravitz said. “I think the misunderstanding was that elements within Red Bull felt that I was saying that they had done something wrong, which of course they did nothing wrong.”
Abu Dhabi needs no rehash for anyone who lived it: Hamilton was in control on the final laps, then-race director Michael Masi reset the race in unprecedented fashion by letting only the lapped cars between Hamilton and Verstappen unlap themselves. Verstappen, on much fresher tyres, did the rest. The FIA’s subsequent report called it “human error” made in “good faith” under intense pressure, and the result stood. Verstappen became World Champion, Hamilton the runner-up.
Almost a year later, a line from Kravitz’s Notebook — “robbed” — ricocheted around social media, snipped and weaponised. Red Bull and Verstappen responded with a weekend-long boycott of Sky’s coverage in Mexico.
“This whole year they have been firing and disrespectful, certainly one person in particular,” Verstappen said at the time. “At some point, I don’t accept it anymore. The atmosphere on social media is toxic. This way you only make it worse.”
Team principal Christian Horner backed his driver. “There were some derogatory comments made so we took a break from Sky for this race. Max was upset. We were upset and we made the decision to stand together as a team. It won’t have done Sky any harm for us to lay down a marker.”
Kravitz maintains his point was never about Red Bull. “It was the easiest strategic call of the season for them to pit under the Safety Car. They lost nothing, it was a free stop. Max drove brilliantly, won the race on fresh tyres and deserved the championship,” he said. “At no point did I say that it was anything that Red Bull had done.”
The problem, he says, was the clip — the single, viral soundbite that flattened the nuance. “Because it was clipped up like that on social media and they saw it, they thought I was saying that Max had robbed him of the championship, which of course, he hadn’t. They hadn’t seen it in context.”
What followed was the grown-up bit: a sit-down in the Red Bull motorhome with Verstappen, Jos and the team. Kravitz says Verstappen’s stance was clear — and, crucially, personal.
“Max referred to this stuff on social media, and he says: ‘Look, I don’t care. People say terrible things about me all the time. I’m doing my job and you’re doing your job. It’s not us that care, it’s the people around me that care. So then if you say or people misinterpret that you say that you think I stole a championship off Lewis – even if you didn’t say that, people think that’s what you said. You’re a voice in Formula One… and then my mum on social media gets abuse or my sister, or Kelly, my partner… it’s them I’m looking to protect.’”
Kravitz’s response was equally human. “I said, Max, I absolutely get it… it’s horrible and regretful and I’m sorry that it gets to these points. But these things get clipped up, it all gets blown up out of proportion and then we get to this point. So then we understood each other completely.”
By Brazil 2022, Verstappen confirmed the boycott was over. “Yeah, we drew a line under it. So we just keep on going.”
It’s worth separating two truths the sport still wrestles with. One: many in the paddock genuinely believed Hamilton was wronged by the way that finale was handled — an institutional failure, not a driver or a team stealing anything. Two: Verstappen did what great drivers do in chaos — he pounced, cleanly, decisively, and earned his crown under the rules as applied on the night.
The episode remains a case study in how a combustible moment, an edit, and a platform can set the tone of a weekend, a season, or an entire relationship between a team and a broadcaster. Credit to both camps for eventually choosing a conversation over a cold war.
In 2025, with different storylines swirling and far more trophies in Verstappen’s cabinet, the temperature around Abu Dhabi has, mostly, cooled. The scar tissue is still there. So is the lesson: context matters, and in Formula 1, the words around a title fight can travel almost as fast as the cars.
