Carlos Sainz has doubts Max Verstappen ever tried to veto Red Bull from promoting him to a race seat in 2019.
The Spaniard was considered first in line to step up should a seat become available at the Milton Keynes squad but that wasn’t what happened as Pierre Gasly was chosen to replace the Renault-bound Daniel Ricciardo.
“It is a very difficult question you could ask him, but I think as we got on well and we have a rivalry, of course, I wouldn’t think he would go to Helmut [Marko] or to Christian [Horner] and say: ‘No I don’t want Carlos [at Red Bull]’,” he told Formula 1’s Beyond the Grid podcast.
“First of all, because the moment you say that, you sound weak, if you to go a team boss and say I don’t want him as a teammate, you already sound weak. Secondly, I don’t think he ever really said that.”
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Instead, Sainz will head to McLaren, replacing hero and mentor Fernando Alonso for next season, yet one myth he was keen to dispell was that he and Verstappen were on bad terms after their time together at Toro Rosso.
“It’s one of the big enigmas of the paddock,” he suggested. “Everyone thinks me and Max hate each other and that’s absolutely not the case. We were having fun that year, I promise. We were having a lot of fun out of the track. In the track, we were extremely competitive.
“We knew we were battling for our careers, for our F1 pedigree in our first year, rookie season. I got on with him a lot better than what people think.”