Max Verstappen, in past, has shared some of the stories of his childhood where his father, Jos Verstappen, was apparently harsh on him. Though the two-time world champion doesn’t have any complaints with his father and thinks it was essential to make him a championship-level driver, others think it was borderline abuse.
Because of it, Verstappen Senior doesn’t share a good rapport with many F1 fans. Moreover, he has also been accused of domestic abuse and beating up Max‘s grandfather.
tw // child abuse / domestic violence / talks of attempted murder
Since there still are a lot of people who don’t know what Jos Verstappen has done in the past, I took the time to compile some of his past actions – a thread
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— Lisa | #GrazieGio 🐝🇮🇹 (@isthisglock) December 4, 2021
But in recent comments, the former Minardi driver denied the allegations of abusing Max. Despite his son’s revelations, he doesn’t think it was abuse, contrary to what fans make of it.
Jos Verstappen denies abusing Max Verstappen
The 51-year-old former F1 race driver agrees that some of his treatments were harsh. However, he doesn’t classify it as abuse and claims he planned to raise the Red Bull star like that.
“There are people who say I’m a bad father because I abused my child,” Jos is quoted as saying. “I never abused him! I raised him, I was hard on him. That was my plan.”
He validates his behavior by saying that it was necessary for his son to reach where he is today. Therefore, he doesn’t expect others to understand it. According to him, many people can’t imagine what it takes to ‘reach the top level’.
The F1 world champion says he needed that behavior
Max echoes his father’s opinion. The 25-year-old, while recalling how his father once kicked him out of the car at a fuel station, claims that it sounded horrible for once, but that was the treatment Max needed to have an elite athlete mentality.
Max talking about the time Jos left in the the gas station. I’m freaking crying. Other people wanted to hug Max and they couldn’t because of Jos. This just breaks my heart so damm much. Max doesn’t deserve this. It gave me chills pic.twitter.com/4gkFGhPVAx
— Ana 🧡 (@maxvcalloway) July 5, 2022
While Jos fully rejects his parenting as an abuse, he also accepts the faults in his behavior. After Verstappen won his first championship in 2021, he agreed that he didn’t have all the wisdom to be a good father, and many mistakes were rooted in that.
He adds that several things with Max happened out of trial and error. The former competitor of Michael Schumacher even claimed that his son’s karting phase was stressful as he was working 12 hours every day of the week.
