Ted Kravitz has pondered how he could have handled his testy interview with Max Verstappen differently.

Verstappen wasn’t particularly impressed by the line of questioning Kravitz embarked upon in a Sky F1 interview ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix.

What did Ted Kravitz ask Max Verstappen?

Verstappen was quizzed on the topic of his contentious Barcelona incident with Mercedes’ George Russell, having arrived in Montreal ahead of this weekend’s Canadian GP.

In what was a particularly controversial incident, Verstappen was given a 10-second time penalty and three penalty points on his FIA Super Licence after clashing with Russell at Turn 5 in the closing stages of the Spanish Grand Prix last time out.

Verstappen had been lunged by Russell into Turn 1 and, avoiding a collision, the Dutch driver took to the escape area at Turn 2 and held onto his position.

But he was advised to give up the place to Russell, fearing a penalty, and backed off out of Turn 4 to allow the Mercedes driver through.

Or so it appeared. Verstappen sped up again as the Mercedes drew alongside and blocked Russell from turning left through Turn 5, resulting in a tap of his Red Bull against the Mercedes.

The stewards took a dim view of the incident, hitting him with the penalties that mean the four-time F1 World Champion is now just a single penalty point away from triggering an automatic race ban.

Kravitz asked Verstappen about it on Thursday in Montreal, pointing to how Red Bull’s head of sporting regulations Steven Knowles must have advised Verstappen’s race engineer GianPiero Lambiase on what to do.

“Since Jonathan Wheatley went, obviously you have Steven Knowles who is doing it,” Kravitz said.

“I assume it was him who told ‘GP’ [Lambiase] to tell you to give the place back to George, which wasn’t the right call. The stewards later confirmed that.

“How are you working that out with him? Obviously, he’s not been in the job too long since Jonathan’s gone to Sauber. How are you working that out that same situation doesn’t happen again?”

Verstappen replied, “I think it’s not really nice to try single out a person to be honest, because that’s never the case. I think we just look at it as a team. What we always can do better, and that’s also how we look at it in Barcelona. But it’s not fair to now single out one single person.”

With Kravitz interjecting to say he didn’t feel he was singling Knowles out, and that he was just “naming him”, Verstappen said, “Well, you named him,” with Kravitz replying, “I just named who he was. Jonathan Wheatley is obviously a well-known guy, I wasn’t saying it was Stephen Knowles’ fault.”

Verstappen: “But you mentioned him.”

Kravitz: “Jonathan Wheatley was a well-known guy, he was your rules guy. Now he [Knowles] is the new guy.”

Verstappen: “So we’re talking about him, you’re singling him out.”

Kravitz: “OK, but he’s on the pit wall. He’s a fairly…”

Verstappen: “I do not need to discuss that anyway here. If we ever look at things that we can do better, we do that like every other team. But I’m not going stand here in front of the camera and say who was at fault exactly.”

Kravitz: “I wasn’t asking…”

Verstappen: “We all live and learn.”

Kravitz: “I wasn’t asking you to do that, just to be clear. I was asking how you… live and learn. Thank you, I think you answered it.”

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Ted Kravitz: What was I supposed to do?

With Verstappen clearly feeling that Kravitz’s line of questioning was singling out a single member of the team, the Sky F1 broadcaster clarified his thinking as he spoke on his Notebook follow-up.

“He wasn’t in a particularly receptive mood about [the George Russell incident], so I thought I’d go with a question about the team mistake that led to that message in error to give the place back to Russell,” Kravitz explained.

“I asked him a question that I thought was going to be on his side and understood his annoyance that set that whole fateful minute and a half off in the first place.

“I said to him, ‘What are you going to be doing to improve the dialogue with your rules man – a guy called Stephen Knowles, who’s taken over from Jonathan Wheatley – to make sure that doesn’t happen again?’.

“Max either misunderstood it by accident or took a rather over-negative interpretation of what I was saying.

“He said, ‘I don’t think it’s fair for you to single somebody out. I would never single somebody out for criticism in the team’.

“What was I meant to do? Was I meant to say an ‘unnamed team representative that deals with the rules’? I said ‘I’m just not here to say it was Stephen Knowles wasn’t it, let’s blame him’.”

“And then he just wouldn’t accept it. He just said, ‘Well, I think it’s not nice of you to do that’, at which point we ended the interview.”

It’s not the first time there has been tension between Red Bull and Sky F1. In late 2022, Red Bull withdrew media privileges from Sky UK, Germany, and Italy, following what team boss Christian Horner branded as ‘unbalanced’ and ‘sensationalist’ reporting.

Kravitz had made comments about how Lewis Hamilton was ‘robbed’ of the 2021 World Championship during the Abu Dhabi season finale – a comment that Red Bull and Max Verstappen took umbrage with.

“I think an accusation of championships being robbed is something that we don’t feel is an impartial commentary,” Horner commented at the time.

“That is, we don’t feel, in any way fair or balanced.

“Max was very upset about it, and as a team, we support him fully. We were equally upset about it. As a team, we took the decision this weekend, I took the decision that we’ll have a weekend off.”

The situation ended amicably after representatives from Sky visited the Red Bull factory for reconciliatory talks ahead of the Brazilian Grand Prix, with Verstappen revealing that his issues with Sky stemmed from “one particular person” – a comment many interpreted as being about Kravitz.

“This year it’s been a constant… yeah, kind of like daily being disrespectful, especially one particular person. And it’s enough, I don’t accept it,” he said.

“You can’t live in the past. You just have to move on. You keep disrespecting me and, at one point, I’m not tolerating it anymore. That’s why I decided to stop answering them.”

But the matter was patched up after Sky made the effort of visiting Red Bull, with Verstappen saying, “Yeah, we drew a line under it. So we just keep on going.”

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