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.