Verstappen did not help Perez in Abu Dhabi: 'Would that be fair racing?'

Perez had much fresher tyres than Leclerc in his final stint, but the race was just a few laps short of getting past the Monegasque. What if Leclerc had been caught by Verstappen? Perez would have been at the back of the Ferrari earlier and perhaps he could have caught up. At the press conference, attended by GPblog, Verstappen says he was not asked to hold up Leclerc.

"No, there was not, but also that is quite a tricky call to make. You also don't want to end up… of course, you can possibly block but is that fair racing? I think not the nicest way going out of the season, like that. And it looked like Checo was catching him enough to try and actually get a move but then he lost quite a bit of time with that bit of a fuss between… was it Pierre and Alex probably? You lost quite a bit of time with that, because I was watching the screen," said the reigning world champion.

No one-two Red Bull

Perez has to call content with a third place finish in the World Cup. Red Bull may have been a little too conservative with Perez in the middle stint, according to Verstappen. "I think, like Checo said, that second stint, because the deg was quite high on the Medium, in hindsight, probably, as a team, we could have pushed a bit more on that on that middle stint for Checo, but that's always easy to say afterwards. At the time, we thought that we had to be a little bit careful on the tyres. Again, we've had a lot of great weekends, but even in great weekends, there are always things that you can learn."

Dutch Editor-in-chief Tim Kraaij reported from Abu Dhabi for this article.