MOTORSPORT
TAKING A DARK TURN
Six pages of news, insight and opinion from the world of motor racing
There’s no going back for Hamilton and Verstappen after crash
Damien Smith
RACING LINES
Hamilton and Verstappen gave us a gripping duel, but it didn’t last long…
No half measures: that’s one of the few things Sir Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen have in common. A wary rather than warm respect has always marked their rivalry, which has now taken a potentially darker hue following the dramatic events at the British Grand Prix.
Some have said that their coming together was inevitable. Then again, a former F1 driver told me earlier in the year that this was one rivalry he couldn’t foresee blowing up, because these two had enough sense to avoid a murky path walked most famously by Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. But as we head to the next instalment of this previously sizzling, now volcanic duel at the Hungaroring, it’s hard to see how the pair will come back from that no-halfmeasures collision at Copse. Nothing between them can ever be the same again.