Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo says his former Red Bull teammate Max Verstappen “absolutely deserved” to win the F1 title.
The Australian said Verstappen’s rival Lewis Hamilton also earned the right to lift the trophy but that he thought it was unfair for people to say Verstappen didn’t deserve it.
The talk is based around the controversial circumstances of the last race of the season. Some cars were allowed to unlap themselves and others not which saw Verstappen overtake Hamilton on the final lap. The action has seen race director Michael Masi lose his job.
“That was kind of, in a way, the shame with [what happened in Abu Dhabi],” he said as per RacingNews365.com. “There was always going to be a winner and a loser last year, no matter how the last race ended, even if it was a boring last lap finish.
“But they both truly deserved a title. They’ve both done phenomenal races, they both come back, and so someone was always going to lose out, I guess. Obviously there’s the Lewis side, but there shouldn’t be a ‘Max doesn’t deserve it’ side, because he absolutely also deserved it.”
And he added the years he spent with the Dutchman at Christian Horner’s team meant he knew it was only a matter of time before he won the world championship.
“For sure, it’s nice for me to know that we had a pretty close battle for those years [that] we were teammates,” he said. “But I didn’t really need to see him win the title to show that to myself. I feel like I really [have] felt that or known that for a while.
“It was kind of a matter of time for him to get a title, for sure.”
