Former Red Bull Sporting Director Jonathan Wheatley has questioned the team’s handling of Max Verstappen’s Lap 1 antics in Saudi Arabia, saying he would’ve advised “something different”.

Verstappen lined up on pole position at the Jeddah Corniche circuit on Sunday, the Dutchman having put in an epic lap to beat Oscar Piastri to P1 in qualifying by one-hundredth of a second.

Should Max Verstappen have given the position back to Oscar Piastri?

But it was the McLaren driver who made the better start.

Challenging Verstappen on the run down to Turn 1, Piastri got the apex ahead of the Red Bull driver only for Verstappen to cut across the run off at Turn 1 to retain the lead.

Piastri: “He needs to give that back.”
Verstappen: “He just pushed me off.”
Piastri: “He was never going to make the corner whether I was there or not.”

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But instead of giving the position back to Piastri, having clearly cut the corner, Verstappen stayed out in front and tried to pull away from the McLaren driver.

The clear air ahead of him made that an easy task; however, the stewards agreed with Piastri’s viewpoint and handed Verstappen a five-second penalty, with the Dutchman’s response to that: “That is [FOM beeped out] lovely.”

But still with clear air ahead of him, he was able to build a bit of a gap to Piastri thus negating some of the five seconds.

However, Wheatley, Red Bull’s former Sporting Director and now Sauber team boss, says he would’ve told Verstappen to give the position back immediately – and then attack.

“Oh, I know what my thoughts were,” Wheatley said as per RacingNews365.

“I mean, I would have done something different, I would have advised to do something differently, I think that was probably the best thing.

“I don’t want anyone commenting on what we would do as a team, I don’t want to comment on what other people would do, but I think in our team, we would have handled it differently, and certainly had a conversation about doing things differently.

“It was a little bit the other way around, but it was like Turn 12 [Verstappen versus Lando Norris] in Texas last year.”

Last season it was Piastri’s team-mate who was hit with a penalty in a Verstappen battle as he overtook Verstappen at Turn 12 at the Circuit of the Americas, doing so outside the track limits.

Although Norris felt Verstappen had forced him wide and off the track, that Verstappen had the apex at the corner meant Norris was deemed to be in the wrong.

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, however, still feels Verstappen’s penalty in Saudi was too much.

“I thought it was very harsh,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com. “We didn’t concede the position because we didn’t believe that he’d done anything wrong.

“You can quite clearly see at the apex of the corner that Max is clearly ahead.

“The rules of engagement were discussed previously, and it was a very harsh decision.

“If we’d have given it up, the problem is you then obviously run in the dirty air as well and you are then at risk with George [Russell], so the best thing to do was at that point we got the penalty, get your head down, keep going.

“We were in good shape. We had to serve the five-second penalty, and thereafter, on the same basic stint as Oscar he finished 2.6 seconds behind, so without that five-second penalty today it would have been a win.

“But there’s always going to be a difference of opinion over a very marginal decision like that.”

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