The cleanest snapshot of how strained Max Verstappen's relationship with parts of the Formula 1 media has become arrived not from a podium press conference or a cooldown-room interview, but from a hospitality suite at Suzuka. Before the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, the three-time world champion sat down for a Red Bull-hosted press session, took one look at the journalists in the room, and refused to begin.
'One second, I'm not speaking before he's leaving,' Verstappen said, gesturing at Guardian Formula 1 correspondent Giles Richards. The remark cleared the room of one reporter — and turned a routine sit-down into one of the most discussed paddock moments of the early 2026 season.
The dispute traces back four months. At the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix, Verstappen and George Russell collided in a flashpoint that drew penalty points and weeks of analysis. Richards, like a number of Dutch reporters since, had asked Verstappen if he regretted what happened. The question apparently kept returning to Verstappen's mind. By Suzuka, he had decided he was not interested in answering it again with Richards in the room.
Crucially, the press session was not an FIA-mandated obligation. It was a Red Bull hospitality event, and the team controls its own invite list — meaning Verstappen had every contractual right to insist the journalist be removed. Whether he should have done so is a different question, and paddock photographer and broadcaster Kym Illman suggested Red Bull's communications staff were privately uncomfortable with the optics. Illman argued that Richards' question about the Russell collision was fair journalism that dozens of reporters had asked or would have asked, and that excluding one writer for asking it set an uncomfortable precedent for a team that depends on positive media exposure across every platform for its premium-brand positioning.
Richards himself responded the following day in The Guardian, defending his career against fresh accusations of bias.
'Over the years I've been accused of anti-Lewis Hamilton, anti-Sebastian Vettel, anti you name the driver bias,' he wrote. 'Reporting as honestly and fairly as possible is always the single overarching aim.'
He also pushed back on a separate Verstappen accusation from a previous Abu Dhabi exchange, in which the Dutchman had said Richards stood opposite him wearing a 'silly grin'.
'I'm not sure I had a stupid grin. I was certainly taken aback by the vehemence of his reply and it might have prompted a nervous smile, but I don't think it was funny nor was I enjoying myself at his expense,' Richards wrote.
There is precedent for the moment — and it is exactly the precedent some F1 reporters were thinking about as they watched Richards walk out. In 2003, Rubens Barrichello refused to take questions at Suzuka while a Brazilian TV Globo reporter he believed had wronged him stood in the room.
'With him here, I'm not answering questions,' Barrichello told the gathered media that day. Several journalists walked out in solidarity, leading Ferrari's press officer to apologise and stage a private follow-up interview. It later transpired Barrichello had identified the wrong journalist.
The 2026 version of that story has not produced the same coordinated walkout, although the conversation about whether it should have done is rippling through the paddock. Build Sport correspondent Michelle reportedly told colleagues over dinner that evening that he would have marched out and urged the others to do the same. A fellow journalist, Jackie of Limberger, was unconvinced — and a spirited argument broke out among reporters about media solidarity in 2026.
What is harder to argue with is the underlying pressure. Verstappen is fighting for a championship he no longer leads, navigating a contract conversation that refuses to subside, and steering a Red Bull project that has slipped behind Mercedes and Ferrari under the new technical regulations. With every confrontation, the gap between the driver and a section of the press widens — and at Suzuka, Red Bull's premium-brand machine briefly looked vulnerable to the side of itself it has never been able to fully manage.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/verstappen-ejects-journalist-suzuka-press-session-richards-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
