Sky Sports F1 reporter Ted Kravitz reacts to the heated exchange with Max Verstappen that went viral

Sky Sports F1 reporter Ted Kravitz has given his take on the heated exchange with Max Verstappen that went viral. On Thursdays of every F1 race weekend, pre-race driver scrums are held where interviews are done ahead of the Grand Prix. As part of the scrums, Kravitz was involved in a heated exchange with the Dutch driver.

The Red Bull driver did not have the best of races in Barcelona. One of the flashpoints in the race was Max Verstappen being asked to give up a position to George Russell as the team preempted a possible penalty. Verstappen was not in favor of giving up the position, and it further enraged him when he got the call.

This was the trigger that ultimately led to Max Verstappen's controversial contact with George Russell. During the pre-race weekend scrum, Sky Sports reporter Ted Kravitz questioned the Dutch driver on whether something is being done to improve the communication, as Jonathan Wheatley was the one who handled it earlier but has been replaced by Stephen Knowles.

This led to a heated exchange where Max Verstappen rebuked Kravitz by saying he won't single out a person in a team as the one who had made a mistake. Once the dust had settled, Ted Kravitz, in his "Montreal Podbook" segment, looked back at the incident and gave his take.

Sharing his initial thought process behind asking the question, Kravitz revealed,

"I thought I’d go with a question about the team mistake that led him to that message in error to give the place back to Russell when the stewards said they were going to make him do it. So I asked him a question that I thought was going to be on his side and understanding his annoyance that set that whole fateful minute and a half off in the first place."

He added,

"So I said to him, ‘Max, what are you going to be doing, with the team, to improve the dialogue between your rules man, a guy called Stephen Knowles, who’s taken over from Jonathan Wheatley – to make sure that doesn’t happen again?’.

Claiming that he felt that the Dutch driver probably misunderstood what he meant, Kravitz said,

“Max either misunderstood it by accident, or took a rather over-negative interpretation of what I was saying. He said, ‘I don’t think it’s fair for you to single somebody out. I would never single somebody out for criticism in the team’."

Giving his side of the story on the back and forth, Kravitz asserted that he did nothing wrong when he pointed out that Jonathan Wheatley was replaced by Stephen Knowles.

"And I said, 'Hang on a moment Max. I'm not criticising, singling someone out. I named him because that's his name. I'm not just going to say, 'A team member who is in charge of the rules'. It's been announced that Jonathan Wheatley's replacement on the rules is a guy called Stephen Knowles. That's common knowledge. Should I not name him?

He added,

“What was I meant to do? Was I meant to say, 'An unnamed team representative that deals with the rules’? I said ‘No Max, I’m not just here to say, it was Stephen Knowles wasn’t it? Let’s blame him’. The question was, 'How have you learned to improve the communication so it doesn't happen again?'.

Max Verstappen's history of boycotting Sky Sports for 2022 F1 Mexican GP after Ted Kravitz comments

Max Verstappen does have a history when it comes to Ted Kravitz and Sky Sports coverage in general. All of this does stem from how the 2021 title battle featuring Lewis Hamilton was covered by the British broadcaster, which has led to quite a bit of criticism from different corners, as Adrian Newey also called the coverage "nationalistic" at times.

In the 2022 F1 Mexican GP, Max Verstappen and Red Bull had made the call to boycott Sky Sports for the entire race weekend. The genesis of it was some of the comments made by Ted Kravitz during the post-race segment in the F1 US GP.

Verstappen has been vocal against the British media in general. Even last season he quite openly talked about "having a different passport" being one of the routes to prevent criticism.

Media and drivers can have an adversarial relationship for sure, but whether there are any next chapters to this would be interesting to see.