A second place at the Hungaroring does not usually generate this much argument. Max Verstappen's radio traffic on the way to it did.
"Please do something about these shifts. And don't tell me it's me shifting later," he told Gianpiero Lambiase mid-race. The blunter version followed: "The car is completely ****ed." By the flag the tone had flipped to disbelief - "I don't know the hell we got second today. It is unbelievable."
He was no calmer in the pen. "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," Verstappen told media including PlanetF1.com, before setting out the shutdown priority list: "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."
Christijan Albers, normally in Verstappen's corner, treated it as a failure of perspective. "There are many positive sides to Max, but there are also negative sides to Max," he told De Telegraaf. "Sometimes I watch certain interviews and wonder about them. There are 22 drivers who want to have the best car and want to win."
The Dutch pundit's sharpest line was about self-absorption rather than ingratitude: "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 wants the champion to shield the factory instead of leading the criticism of it. "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, adding that "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 heard something else entirely. On the Sky Sports F1 Show, the commentator asked whether the volume was tactical. "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 grants the underlying complaint. "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." He simply does not think that explains a full race of it. "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's version puts the fault on the other side of the steering wheel. "I have to be honest, especially because Max always pushes the limits, that for some reason it might also be down to him," the Sky Deutschland pundit 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 account, given after a similar gearbox tirade at Spa, is the least dramatic on offer. "I'm always very sensitive to these things because I want to work on that and improve it," he said. "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 conduct is harder to read than any of the quotes. After Hungary qualifying, Verstappen's usual five-minute Dutch media slot was ended by a team minder at two minutes and the international session ran about 90 seconds. A scheduled meeting was blamed. Isack Hadjar, notionally due at the same meeting, kept talking.
Sixth on 109 points and 110 adrift of Kimi Antonelli, Verstappen returns at Zandvoort on 23 August with a contract that runs to 2028. Whether the radio is diagnosis or leverage is the story of the second half of the season.