Sky F1 presenter lifts lid on ‘horrific’ abuse after 2025 Max Verstappen interview
Sky F1 presenter Rachel Brookes suffered online abuse after asking Max Verstappen if he deliberately collided with George Russell
Sky F1 presenter Rachel Brookes opened up on the “horrific” online abuse she suffered after interviewing Max Verstappen following his controversial Barcelona 2025 collision with George Russell.
Brookes explained how Nico Rosberg’s remarks during commentary, suggesting that Verstappen’s move looked deliberate, led to her to putting the question to the four-time world champion.
Sky F1’s Rachel Brookes talks post-Max Verstappen interview abuse
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Verstappen received a 10-second penalty at the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix after colliding with George Russell’s Mercedes.
Later that year, Verstappen admitted that he made “a mistake” in that moment with Russell, but following the race, Brookes asked Verstappen whether he had deliberately made contact with Russell.
Brookes felt it a valid question to ask after what her Sky F1 colleague, 2016 world champion Rosberg, had said in the commentary booth.
Appearing on the Road To Success podcast, Brookes said: “Nico Rosberg was on our programme that weekend.
“He’d implied he thought it was deliberate. This is what our pundits were saying. Nico, as a Formula 1 driver and a world champion, said it looked deliberate.
“So I’m in the pen, and there is no one better than a Formula 1 world champion to tell me what could have happened in that moment.
“I’m not making a summary myself here, I’m literally relaying what our world champion on the team thinks.
“I said to Max: ‘Was it deliberate?’
“His response was: “Does it matter?’
“And I said to him, ‘Well, I think it does,’ because in that moment I’m a fan watching at home.
“The reason I said that was because in Imola, just before, he had pulled off that incredible move at the start of the race.
“He had our commentators and our pundits open-mouthed at how fantastic his move was at the start of the race.
“That is what Max does, and Max can do. So to me, when he did what he did with George, it took some of the shine off, which is what I said to him.
“And I hate that, because he’s incredible, and he has those little moments that give people cause to criticise him, and it really frustrated me as a fan that had happened.”
Brookes’ peers in the industry were supportive of her putting that question to Verstappen.
The landscape among fans online, however, was very different.
As reported at the time by PlanetF1.com, Brookes revealed in the aftermath of last year’s Spanish Grand Prix that she had disabled comments on her Instagram account after receiving “enormous amounts of vile abuse.”
She has since reactivated her comments on the social media platform.
She continued: “I got a lot of messages from people in broadcasting, in sports broadcasting, saying: ‘Well done for asking the question.’
“Because nobody else in that pen that day asked him that question – and even my colleagues said they wouldn’t have asked that question, because they’d have been too scared to ask it. Colleagues who do that pen admitted they wouldn’t have asked it.
“I didn’t feel particularly brave. I just came at it from an inquisitive nature.
“But then the fans, the social media side of it, was horrendous. I got people telling me I should never be able to have children because I’m a bad example. I got the most horrific stuff you could imagine.
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“And this is from a lot of these profiles with dads with kids with daughters and things like that, where you just look at it and think: ‘Take a step back. It’s a Formula 1 race. It’s sport.’
“But the stuff I got sent was horrendous, utterly horrendous. So I just closed my comments.”
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