Max Verstappen finished second at the Hungaroring. On the radio he sounded like a man who had finished last.
"Please do something about these shifts. And don't tell me it's me shifting later," he told race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase during the race. Later came the line that travelled furthest: "The car is completely ****ed." Then, at the flag, something close to bewilderment. "I don't know the hell we got second today. It is unbelievable."
He did not soften it afterwards. Speaking to media including PlanetF1.com, Verstappen said: "I was just like, 'How the hell did I end up here?' That was it for me. I was shocked. I'm actually still shocked." On what Red Bull has to fix over the shutdown, he was specific: "We need to first find more overall performance. Then we need to fix our problems, where we sometimes just lose performance over a weekend, or even from the start of the race to the end."
That is the raw material. What the paddock cannot agree on is what it means.
Christijan Albers, one of Verstappen's most consistent defenders in the Dutch media, has broken ranks on this one. Talking to De Telegraaf, he argued the four-time champion has lost sight of the fact that everyone on the grid is fighting the same fight. "There are many positive sides to Max, but there are also negative sides to Max," Albers said. "Sometimes I watch certain interviews and wonder about them. There are 22 drivers who want to have the best car and want to win."
Albers stopped short of calling it disloyal, but not far short. "I think he is so focused on himself in that respect that he no longer realises those other 21 drivers also want to win and become world champion." He also thinks Verstappen could carry more of the load publicly. "You can see it with Adrian Newey too - you cannot simply create a basic package from nothing. You have to work with the material you have," Albers said. "There are a thousand people working at the factory and perhaps seven hundred of them want to move in the same direction as you."
David Croft reads the same radio traffic as a negotiating position. On the Sky Sports F1 Show, the lead commentator put the question bluntly: "Max is certainly not advertising for a job as a second-hand car salesman the way he was talking about his Red Bull, but is there something behind this?"
Croft accepts the technical complaint has a basis. "From what I understand, the Red Bull is a decent car when it's in perfect condition, but when there's a slight discrepancy [...] it doesn't take much to throw it out of kilter," he said. "When it's good, it's very, very good. When it's slightly bad, it's ugly." What he does not accept is that the volume matches the problem. "For Max to be complaining as much as he was constantly throughout that race, that makes me think that there are other motives afoot here. Are Max's representatives, working together as a team, trying to engineer a way out of Red Bull and maybe into McLaren? We don't know the answer."
Ralf Schumacher goes somewhere else again - and somewhere less flattering. The Sky Deutschland pundit has suggested part of the RB22's unpredictability is self-inflicted. "I have to be honest, especially because Max always pushes the limits, that for some reason it might also be down to him," Schumacher said. "Perhaps it's his driving style, that he simply demands too much from the car. With Hadjar, it happens almost less, you have to say."
Verstappen's own diagnosis is narrower than any of them. Asked about an earlier gearbox rant at Spa - "My God, these ******* shifts! It's unacceptable, this" - he put it down to software and to his own threshold. "I'm always very sensitive to these things because I want to work on that and improve it," he told RacingNews365 and others. "I think there was a software upgrade, or downgrade, that it took a bit of time for the shifts to learn basically, and then it got a bit better again at the end."
Red Bull's own behaviour is the loudest data point nobody has explained. After Hungary qualifying, where Verstappen described the car as broken aerodynamically before taking P6, his usual five-minute Dutch media session was cut off by a team minder after two minutes; the international pen lasted about 90 seconds. The team said a scheduled meeting was to blame. Isack Hadjar, supposedly required at the same meeting, carried on talking.
Verstappen sits sixth on 109 points, 110 behind Kimi Antonelli, with the Dutch GP at Zandvoort on 23 August. He is under contract to 2028. Whether the radio is a symptom or a strategy is a question the second half of the season will answer, and the answer will be worth more than a podium.
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*Originally published on [NewsFormula One](https://newsformula.one/article/verstappens-radio-war-albers-wants-loyalty-croft-suspects-an-exit-plan). Visit for full coverage.*