right, ok, haha teehee Max insisted on a journalist being thrown out of the press conference before he'd talk. must be one of the bad guys, right? [Padme meme]
no. it's Giles Richards. he's the Guardian's F1 correspondent. Giles is one of a tiny handful of F1 journalists with any frickin principles at all and a tiny percentage of people in motorsport who's left wing.
it's literally just Max taking affront that he got asked exactly the same sort of question anyone else gets asked when they lose a championship ('do you regret a mistake that cost you points, now') Lando got asked the same thing, pretty brutally, the previous year. Lewis was even asked it in 2021 re: Baku. this is a normal fucking question.
throwing Giles out of a press conference months later is child behaviour. if Max can't take a tough (but very much predictable) question then, well, maybe time to spend six months psychoanalysing whether his head is cooked.*
there are so many genuinely bad guys in that room - like let's just take one example here but literally everyone in the F1 paddock knows who Adam Cooper is. he actually advertises the teenage girl modelling agency he runs on the back window of his car for the European rounds. he has been credibly accused of grooming and is publicly and loudly vile to any woman he meets. he's still in the fucking presser though isn't he!
*I don't think anyone should do this. but as an example of really quite unpleasant stuff he was not asked and other drivers put up with fairly serenely this is, y'know. quite a big one last year.
