Damon Hill has hit back at Fernando Alonso after the Aston Martin driver suggested Formula 1 was being unfair to Max Verstappen given his difficult 2026 campaign.
Verstappen has endured a torrid season by his own high standards, sitting seventh in the Drivers’ standings, some 103 points off championship leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli, and is still searching for his first win of the year.
His weekend at Silverstone ended in the gravel at Stowe, with a spin in the closing laps leaving him classified 20th — effectively his third retirement of the campaign.
Alonso, speaking to Spanish outlet Mundo Deportivo, suggested that Verstappen’s lack of competitiveness this year says more about the machinery than the man. The Aston Martin driver suggested Verstappen remains the standout talent on the grid, questioning whether the sport’s current landscape – notably the new technical regulations – was doing him justice.
But 1996 World Champion Hill was not persuaded, and posted on his Instagram story: “What a load of rubbish!”
Hill, like many pundits, is not unbecoming in his opinions, having previously compared Verstappen to Wacky Races character Dick Dastardly during his 2024 title battle with Lando Norris.
Hill has previously drawn a firmer line between combativeness and recklessness in his critiques of the Red Bull driver, agreeing with comparisons made by Alain Prost between Verstappen and Niki Lauda’s directness, while stressing that Lauda’s racing intelligence set him apart from any tendency toward physical confrontation on track.
The 65-year-old has also pointed to his own background in motorcycle racing — where contact between competitors carries far graver consequences — as a source of his unease with wheel-to-wheel aggression in F1, an issue that struck close to home following his own title-deciding collision with Michael Schumacher at Adelaide in 1994.
With Verstappen’s future increasingly a talking point amid the struggles of the Red Bull package, the debate over how the sport should be judging one of its greatest ever drivers looks unlikely to go away any time soon.
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