Formula 1 and Canal+ pundit Romain Grosjean publicly apologised to McLaren and Zak Brown over comments made during coverage of the Spanish Grand Prix at the Madring.
Present in Madrid for the Spanish GP, the Frenchman sharply criticised comments made by the McLaren team principal during Sunday’s race, initially believing that remarks made after qualifying had been damaging to Oscar Piastri’s morale.
“I saw a statement from Zak Brown about Lando Norris’ lap, he cut Oscar Piastri to pieces with a pair of scissors and a chainsaw right there”, Romain Grosjean initially said, after reigning world champion Norris had taken pole position at the Madring the previous day. “If Piastri had any morale left, he doesn’t have any anymore.
“The harshness, the violence of that statement… The question was that Norris had done a good qualifying and he was asked how to explain the difference. Basically, he said that Lando was world champion and that he was better than Oscar.
“He kind of forgot that last year, Oscar was leading the world championship, that at Monza they asked him to let Lando past and that perhaps wasn’t necessarily the thing to do at that point. It was surprising, very surprising, and it left me speechless when I heard that statement.”
The problem was that Brown had not actually made those comments. Grosjean had in fact misunderstood what the McLaren boss had said during an interview conducted after qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix on F1 TV, in the presence of Juan Pablo Montoya, Jolyon Palmer… and Grosjean himself.
Zak Brown braised his driver’s qualifying result
Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images
“The whole lap was amazing and Lando’s just getting better and better and better”, Brown had said. “When you see a lap like that put down, you just go, ‘he’s a world champion’.”
Then, asked by Montoya about the performance gap between his two drivers, he added: “I think a) you got Lando on his A-plus game, right? So, I don’t think there was anything left laptime-wise there. So, he found that.
“Oscar’s been right there with him all weekend and just didn’t get that same extra lap. We’ll continue to look at it. He’ll look at the data and probably do what we all did and go, ‘wow, what a lap’ as well.”
Grosjean’s comments on Canal+ during the live broadcast of the race did not go unnoticed and were widely shared and discussed, particularly on social media.
On Sunday evening, this led the Frenchman to apologise for his remarks and he explained that he had indeed misunderstood Brown’s comments.
“Today, I made a comment on Canal+ regarding Zak Brown’s comments about Oscar Piastri during an interview yesterday on F1 TV, which I was part of,” he wrote.
“I completely misunderstood his words and want to apologise for that. I know how important it is to Zak and the entire McLaren team to respect their drivers and treat them fairly and equally.
“McLaren had the fastest car today and were unlucky with the VSC. I’m sure both Lando and Oscar will have another chance to fight for the win in Baku.”
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