F1 news LIVE: Lewis Hamilton ignoring FIA as Max Verstappen warned over ban

Max Verstappen hopes that other young drivers will break through in 2022 and duel with him and Lewis Hamilton for the F1 title.

“Lewis is 36 now, so maybe there are a few more years for him, hopefully a few more years for me after that,” said Verstappen. “I hope, of course, he will stay in the sport a bit longer and we can have more of these battles.

“But I also hope other young guys – because hopefully with the new rules more teams will be more competitive – that we all have that fight against him as well. He’s a seven-time world champion and it has been a pleasure to race against him this year especially.”

Bottas himself has insisted he feels “unbeatable” on his best days, despite struggling to challenge Lewis Hamilton during his time at Mercedes.

“I honestly feel like on my best days, whether it’s a race or qualifying, I’m unbeatable. But unfortunately, I don’t always have the best days,” Bottas told The Race. “No-one has!

“I can’t say I exceeded any of my expectations. I have pretty high expectations for myself, personally. Maybe a bit too high.

“I can’t say I exceeded anything. Where I feel like I failed, obviously I didn’t manage to win the Drivers’ Championship. But it wasn’t simple alongside Lewis. He always got the upper hand.

“I feel like the ones who know about the sport and who follow the sport, they definitely acknowledge I can be pretty fast on my day.

“The baseline level as a driver like Lewis is so high that it’s quite tricky to outperform him all the time.”

Sebastian Vettel said it was “a shame” to see Valtteri Bottas leave Mercedes – but believes the Finn can revel in being the main man at Alfa Romeo.

George Williams will succeed Bottas at Mercedes next season while Bottas will partner rookie Guanyu Zhou.

“Somehow I think it’s a shame that he has to leave Mercedes,” Vettel said. “But maybe the new regulations for the Swiss team in 2022 will suit him, so that things will finally be more balanced in the field and he will have more chances.

“Valtteri is one of the most straightforward and honest drivers. And above all, Bottas is also one of the fastest drivers in the field.”

“I’m happy that he can play a much more central role there than before. Bottas certainly didn’t always have it easy in the five years alongside Hamilton. But I’m also sure that he was always treated fairly at Mercedes.”

Nicholas Latifi has defended the distance between his and George Russell’s performances at Williams last season, suggesting the gap was not always as large as it seemed.

Russell routinely outperformed Latifi both in qualifying and on race days throughout the season, but while the Canadian admitted Lewis Hamilton’s new teammate is one of the best drivers on the track, he insisted the difference was exaggerated by narrowly missing out on Q2.

“Sometimes in my situation, it was frustrating to find myself out of Q2 by a very small margin, sometimes I was really close to George. Then of course he would improve his time in Q2, and at the end of the race his Q2 time would often be compared to my Q1 time, making it seem like a huge gap.

“But it always comforted me to know that the team had the picture of everything, and obviously I was very happy to see that before the summer break things improved, and continued in the right direction afterwards.

“I know I had one of the fastest drivers on the grid as a teammate, I think that will be even more clear to everyone next season.”

Pierre Gasly has sympathised with the struggles of his AlphaTauri teammate Yuki Tsunoda after a difficult season for the young Japanese driver.

Tsunoda finished with just 32 points in comparison to Gasly’s 110, and only managed to outperform his teammate once in qualifying all season.

“It’s difficult because it takes so much energy focusing on your own thing,” Gasly said. “I think listening from what Yuki says, he learned quite a lot from looking at the data, seeing the way I work with the team, and just seeing my approach.

“I think he probably didn’t expect to struggle that much, from what he says, coming into Formula 1. The level in F1 at the moment in the midfield, it’s really hard.

“A four-time World Champion driving for Aston Martin (Vettel) with a double World Champion driving for Alpine [Alonso], very strong line-up at Ferrari, very strong line-up at McLaren, even Kimi, a champion at Alfa Romeo.

“The level is really high and probably higher than even the last couple of years. For sure, as a rookie coming in was not easy.”

Charles Leclerc has hailed the influence of his Ferrari teammate Carlos Sainz, with the 24-year-old admitting he felt “pushed very, very much” as the pair jousted throughout the 2021 season.

Sainz eventually finished the season five points ahead of Leclerc, despite the predictions of many that the Monégasque would be the dominant driver out of the Ferrari pairing.

“We learned a lot,” Leclerc said. “As always when you have a new team-mate you always learn, [such as] the new ways Carlos is approaching race weekends, the way he works, his talent, his raw speed also, the way he takes the corners.

“He had an amazing year, so he obviously pushed me very, very much to try and perform better at every race and it’s just been extremely interesting.”

“I think maybe one of the strong points of Carlos is the race management and tyre management, and that was probably my weakness in 2019.

“I progressed a lot as a driver in 2020 and again last year, and part of last year was thanks to Carlos.”

Johannson also reserved fierce criticism for FIA race director Michael Masi’s decision-making in Abu Dhabi after Nicholas Latifi crashed out.

“The only way it should have been done was by doing what you’d normally do and indeed what he did in the race prior,” he said. “As soon as they deployed the safety car with five laps to go they should have red flagged the race.

“That’s the only way to keep it level and keep the excitement until the end. You would have had everyone come into the pits while they clear the track, put new tyres on and go from there like they did at the Saudi Grand Prix when Red Bull rebuilt half their car and put new tyres on.

“Had that been done you could have had a fair five-lap shootout for the championship. Making the decisions he did and then changing his mind completely at the very last moment absolutely handed the race on a plate to Max and Red Bull after Lewis had done a flawless race.

“This last race was just the culmination of a series of incredibly bad calls that somehow seem to have escalated as the year went on.”

Stefan Johannson has become the latest former F1 driver to deplore how the season-deciding race in Abu Dhabi unfolded. The Swede, who started 79 races in an 11-year career, wrote on his blog that the sport’s pursuit of drama had led it into a “dangerous territory”, where competitive integrity is being sacrificed for the sake of entertainment.

“They both drove at such a high level and both their teams operated at equally high levels, and it would have been such an incredible ending to the year to have it decided fair and square on the racetrack.

“Instead, we now have this endless controversy and polarization. I’m sure the folks at Liberty are not complaining as this has lifted F1 to a whole new level in terms of people following.

“But, if this is the direction it will continue, where the entertainment comes before the sport, I think we’re getting into a very dangerous territory, I would hate to see F1 turning into the Motorsports version of the WWF [now known as WWE], where it’s just a show and the sport is secondary to the entertainment.

“The Netflix show has obviously helped lift the profile of F1 immensely, especially in the US. I know how many of the teams and drivers feel about it, but you still can’t deny the impact it’s had. Personally, I had to tune out after 15 minutes.

“I think it’s important to find a good balance going forward, I appreciate social media and marketing from every possible angle is important, but I would hate to see the drivers turning into some sort of comedians and clowns rather than brave young men doing their thing on Sunday afternoons.”

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Although the dust has now settled on Max Verstappen’s dramatic and highly controversial victory over Lewis Hamilton in Abu Dhabi, the ill-feeling continues to linger. The FIA’s new president, Mohammed bin Sulayem, revealed that the seven-time world champion was not responding to messages after the governing body threatened to penalise the Briton for failing to attend F1’s prize-giving gala.

“I’ve sent him messages,” Bin Sulayem said. “I don’t think he’s 100 per cent ready to respond right now. We don’t blame him. I understand his position, as a driver, obviously, he is at a different level.

“But there are also rules. As you read in the press, the new president is going to sanction; of course they [the media] spice things up a lot with what is important for others.

“But for me it’s not particularly related to a certain driver or a certain team. It’s general. There are rules we have to respect, and we have to respect the integrity of the FIA. And I can’t judge anyone until I know the exact facts.

“In fact, my first objective is to go through the whole Abu Dhabi file.

“I think of course by not being at the gala, it’s something that Lewis and his team knew. But at the end of the day, we’re human too. There was stress and pressure.”