Montoya calls Verstappen Miami spin save 'pure luck'

Juan Pablo Montoya said Max Verstappen’s 360-degree recovery after his opening-lap spin in the Miami Grand Prix was “pure luck”, setting up a sharp split with Jolyon Palmer and Martin Brundle over whether the moment was a fortunate escape or another example of elite car control.

Verstappen spun at Turn 2 while fighting Charles Leclerc for the lead, dropping from second on the grid to ninth, but kept the car pointing in the right direction and avoided heavier damage to his race before recovering to finish fifth. Verstappen later described it with a joke when speaking to PlanetF1.com and other media: “I lost the rear in Turn 2 and then of course I tried to minimise the time loss by doing a 360.” He added: “Yeah, I thought I was going to crash but then I floored it, so I managed to do a good 360. If F1 doesn’t work out I can always go rally.”

Asked if contact with Leclerc had caused the spin, Verstappen rejected that explanation. “Just one of those things. I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, we just pushed, of course, into the corner, but, yeah, just lost something. The rear just started to slide. And once it goes, you know, with heavy fuel it’s hard to catch.”

The argument over what happened next became the real talking point. On F1TV’s post-race show, former Renault driver and analyst Jolyon Palmer said Verstappen had shown a repeatable skill rather than stumbled into a good outcome. “I think he’s got such a skill set at spinning cars and get it going again at the right point,” Palmer said.

Montoya was unconvinced. The former Williams and McLaren driver replied: “You think that’s talent? I thought it was pure luck.” As Palmer tried to explain the precision involved, Montoya held to the same line, arguing that once a driver comes off the throttle, the car naturally stops rotating. “As soon as you get out of the gas, the car stops spinning, yeah, but…” he said, before eventually conceding only with a brief “Okay.”

Palmer’s case was that the recovery window is too small to dismiss as chance. He said drivers have only “10 degrees of 360 for it to be nicely forward” while also managing the brake pedal, steering and clutch. He pointed to Verstappen’s spin at Stowe during last year’s British Grand Prix and the Dutchman’s famous 2019 Hockenheim pirouette, which Palmer said cost “about 1.5 seconds”, as proof this was part of a pattern rather than a one-off.

Brundle backed that view on Sky Sports F1 and in his Sky F1 column. He blamed the original mistake on Verstappen being “too eager on the throttle” after Leclerc’s fast start left the Ferrari alongside through Turn 1 and pinched Red Bull at the Turn 2 apex. But Brundle still described the save itself as “genius”, writing that Verstappen “deftly used the throttle, brakes, and steering wheel to execute a full 360-degree turn, pointing nicely down the racetrack and somehow maintaining some forward speed.”

For Brundle, that mattered because it was what kept Verstappen in the race. He said the recovery “dramatically minimised the chances of being run into and kept him in ninth place at the end of the lap,” a crucial difference in the middle of a tightly packed field.

That leaves Miami with two very different readings of the same moment. Montoya saw a spinning car that happened to stop in a usable direction. Palmer and Brundle saw a driver controlling a bad situation with unusual precision, and their argument carries extra weight because Verstappen has done it before under pressure.