With the late Safety Car period doing Perez no favours, the Mexican racer struggling on the restart on medium tyres, Red Bull told Perez to let team-mate Verstappen through. The thinking was that he could attack first Fernando Alonso and then Charles Leclerc up front and take vital points away from the Ferrari driver, who is Perez’s rival for P2 in the Drivers’ Championship, with Verstappen the escapee World champion. But the condition was that if Verstappen couldn’t pass Alonso, he had to give the place back to Perez. He failed to pass Alonso and did not give Perez back that P6. Perez was understandably angry, saying that after all the times he played the team game in favor of Verstappen, the Dutchman had on this occasion shown his true colours, Verstappen meanwhile told Red Bull they know the reasons for who ignored the request. And so Chandhok feels Verstappen failed to see the long-term picture with his decision. “Honestly, I don’t understand why he won the World Championship. I think it’s a bit short-sighted as well because you know he might need Checo’s help next year in the World Championship battle,” Chandhok told Sky Sports F1. “He needed him last year in Abu Dhabi, he needed him at other times this year, so for me this is a bit of a short-sighted decision. “I go back to someone like Ayrton Senna. He gave a win in Japan in 1991 to his teammate because he knew he wanted that belief, he wanted [Gerhard] Burger on the side. And I think that’s a slightly short-sighted move there.” Chandhok’s fellow race driver and pundit Naomi Schiff said it takes a “certain ego” to be the clear driver in a team where Verstappen is at Red Bull, although she feels something unknown to the public has happened between of drivers. “I wonder if it’s a bit tit for tat,” Schiff said. “I think it takes some ego to be a dominant driver in a team. “Not that that’s always going to work in your favor, but clearly something happened in there that we can either guess at, or you can just say we don’t know exactly what it is, but maybe Max is just setting the record straight on” if you crucify me, I will not help you.’ Chandhok agreed with Schiff’s assessment, explaining that this appeared to be a case of Verstappen delivering a reminder of how he sees himself at the Red Bull team. “I think today I go back to what Naomi just said, I think she was a race driver who thought about herself and put a stake in the ground ‘I’m the number one driver in this team,’” Chandhok said. “At that moment, as a driver in the cockpit, he’s not thinking about all these other factors here, so that went a long way to establishing himself as the number one driver in this team.” Perez now heads into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix level on points with Leclerc, who needs to overtake him to claim P2 in the standings. Read more: Christian Horner asked about Max Verstappen’s team order refusal at Sao Paulo GP
