Sky Sports F1 reporter Rachel Brookes has been forced to take down her comment sections on Instagram and X after receiving a barrage of abuse following an interview with Max Verstappen at the Spanish Grand Prix. Brookes, who often shares media pen interviews with fellow Sky F1 reporters Ted Kravitz and Craig Slater, had the challenge of discussing Verstappen’s crash with George Russell, with the Dutchman still frustrated, being fresh out of the cockpit.
The reigning world champion was hit with a 10-second time penalty and three penalty points for the incident. Verstappen was asked if the contact was intentional, to which he replied: “Does it matter? When pressed further on it, the Red Bull racer fired back: “Yeah, OK. That’s great. I prefer to speak about the race rather than one single moment.”
Brookes then praised Verstappen’s talent, but her next comment irritated the 27-year-old. “It’s horrible to see that shine taken off, for fans and the kids watching,” she said, before the four-time world champion replied: “Well, that’s your opinion. We’ll leave it there.”
The video gained a lot of attention on social media amid the flurry of fan opinions offered on Verstappen’s contact with Russell, and the subsequent penalties he received. Lots of negative comments were also directed toward Brookes, with a portion of the Red Bull driver’s passionate fanbase overstepping the mark.
“I will be posting on here as usual but comments/tags/mentions on here and on X have been disabled for the foreseeable future due to the enormous amounts of vile abuse I was sent after the Spanish GP,” Brookes posted in Montreal. “I may switch them back on at a later date but for now they will stay off.”
One race on from Brookes’ difficult chat with Verstappen, Ted Kravitz also found himself on the wrong side of the reigning world champion. He accused the pit lane reporter of ‘singling out’ Red Bull’s senior race strategy engineer, Stephen Knowles, over the Russell incident.
“I think it’s not really nice to try and single out a person, because that’s never the case,” Verstappen fumed. “I think we just look at it as a team, what we always can do better, and that’s also how we look at it in Barcelona. But it’s not fair to now single out one single person.”
This wasn’t the end of Verstappen’s interview drama in Canada, either. In the post-qualifying press conference, he described Tom Clarkson’s question about super license penalty points as “childish”, cutting the presser’s anchor off mid-sentence.
