Kevin Magnussen has accused Sergio Perez of "intimidating" him on track and doubled down on his insistence that he was not to blame for their Monaco Grand Prix crash.
Both drivers crashed out on the first lap, along with Magnussen's team-mate Nico Hulkenberg, on the first lap of the race. The Dane had attempted to move past Perez on the run up to the second corner but ran out of room and was sandwiched between the Red Bull and the barrier.
Perez span and hit the wall hard, causing damage estimated to cost around £2million to fix. Despite the severity of the smash, the stewards decided it was a racing incident and decided not to investigate further. Both Perez and Magnussen absolved themselves of blame after the race. And the Mexican put the disappointment behind him this week with the announcement that he has signed a new two-year deal to remain with Red Bull until the end of 2026.
Ahead of this weekend's Canadian Grand Prix, though, Haas driver Magnussen revisited the incident and continues to insist that Perez was the one in the wrong. He said: "I don't see Checo as a dirty driver or anything, but I was surprised that he didn't leave me the room.
"Clearly, he was just pushing me to the wall to intimidate me and have me back out. But I don't think... that's certainly not the way we should be racing. He can't argue that he didn’t see me. He saw me. There's no way around it. He did see me. So yeah, that is the reason I kept it flat, because I trusted that he would leave me the space seeing as he'd seen me."
Perez had a different point of view and could not believe the stewards had failed to investigate the incident. "I'm very surprised because the amount of damage and how dangerous the damage was, I'm fairly surprised," he said.
"We need to ask for a reason why it's not been investigated because without an investigation we don't get a reason why it wasn't a penalty. I'm really surprised. I think I got the 'lap one, let them race', but I think this was more dangerous driving just to keep it flat out knowing that they were going to come contact at some point. I think that was some dangerous driving."
His boss Christian Horner agreed and the Red Bull chief said: "I was surprised it wasn't investigated because it was quite a hefty incident. Given he had a wheel up the inside in a part of the track that only ever narrows, you would have expected him to back out. Not only has he destroyed Checo's race and the car, he's also destroyed his team-mate's race, so not very clever."
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