Sky’s Rachel Brookes Reveals the ‘Horrific’ Abuse She Faced After One Question to Max Verstappen

• Sky F1 presenter Rachel Brookes has spoken publicly about the wave of online abuse she received after asking Max Verstappen whether a clash with George Russell had been deliberate.
• Brookes says broadcasters privately thanked her for asking the question, yet online she was sent messages telling her she should never be allowed to have children.
• Her account, given on the Road to Success podcast, has reopened a difficult conversation about how F1 reporters are treated by parts of the sport’s fanbase.

Rachel Brookes has stood in the Formula 1 paddock with a microphone for well over a decade. She has interviewed world champions on their best days and their worst, learned when to press and when to let a silence sit. So when she finally talked through what happened after one short exchange with Max Verstappen, the detail that landed hardest was not the question itself. It was what arrived afterwards.

Speaking on the Road to Success podcast, the Sky Sports F1 presenter described some of the messages as the most personal and cruel she has received in her career. The interview that set them off lasted barely a minute. The fallout, she said, ran on far longer than that.

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The question that started it

At the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix, Verstappen had been involved in a contentious collision with George Russell. Up in the Sky commentary box, Nico Rosberg had suggested the move looked deliberate. When Brookes reached Verstappen in the interview pen, she put the point to him without dressing it up.

“I said to Max, ‘Was it deliberate?'” Brookes recalled. “And his response was, ‘Does it matter?'”

She did not let it drop. “Yeah, I think it does to the fans watching and to the kids,” she told him at the time, explaining that she was coming at it from a supporter’s point of view. “I want people to see how good you are, and you make it difficult when you do stuff like that.” It was the kind of exchange that, in a calmer era, might have been forgotten by the next session. Instead it became a flashpoint.

‘The most horrific stuff you could imagine’

What followed was not a debate about racing. It was a pile-on. Brookes said the volume and the nature of the messages quickly tipped from criticism into something far darker.

“The fans, the social media side of it, was horrendous,” she said. “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.”

The part she kept returning to was who was sending it. Many of the accounts, she noted, belonged to people who presented themselves as ordinary family men. “This is from a lot of these profiles with dads with kids, with daughters and things like that,” she said, “where you just look at it and think, ‘Take a step back. It’s a Formula 1 race. It’s sport.'” The mismatch between the everyday avatars and the venom in the messages was, for her, the most unsettling thing of all.

Praised in private, attacked in public

The strangest contrast came from inside the industry. Away from the timeline, Brookes said her phone filled with quiet messages of support from people who do the same job she does.

“I got a lot of messages from people in broadcasting, in sports broadcasting, saying, ‘Well done for asking the question,'” she said. “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.”

That is a revealing admission about the modern paddock. Verstappen is the biggest name in the sport and, at his most guarded, one of the most intimidating interviews on the grid. Asking him a pointed question carries a cost that other subjects simply do not. Brookes asked anyway, and then absorbed the consequences while colleagues who agreed with her stayed silent in public.

A pattern Formula 1 keeps repeating

Brookes is not the first figure in the sport to be targeted this way, and she will not be the last. After the 2021 season finale in Abu Dhabi, Williams driver Nicolas Latifi received death threats over an incident that had nothing to do with the title fight beyond its timing. The then race director Michael Masi was hounded off social media in the aftermath of the same race. Drivers, stewards, engineers and reporters have all found themselves in the crosshairs when a result or a question collides with a tribal fanbase.

What has changed is the reach and the speed. A single clip now travels around the world in minutes, stripped of context, ready to be fed to whichever audience will react hardest. For someone whose job is to stand in front of a camera and ask the obvious question, there is no hiding place once that clip starts to move.

The quiet cost of asking the question

There is a practical fallout to all of this that rarely gets discussed. Reporters who absorb that kind of treatment learn, consciously or not, to soften the next question. The mental calculation is simple and corrosive: is the honest follow-up worth a week of abuse aimed at your family. Most viewers never see that calculation happening, but it shapes the interviews they watch. When the cost of a direct question climbs high enough, the questions get gentler, and the sport gets a little less honest.

Brookes has been around long enough to resist that pull, and her standing inside the sport gives her a measure of protection that a younger freelancer would not have. That is part of why her account carries far beyond her own experience. If one of the most established broadcasters on the grid can be driven to lock down her replies and brace for the worst after a single fair question, the people earlier in their careers are watching, and learning what it might cost them to push.

None of this is an argument for going easy on the drivers. Verstappen can handle a hard question, and he answered this one in his own clipped style without complaint. The issue sits entirely with the audience that decided a reporter doing her job was fair game. Brookes telling the story plainly, without rancour, is the most effective response available to her. It names the behaviour, refuses to be shamed by it, and dares the people responsible to look at what they sent.

Why she chose to talk about it now

The setting for Brookes’ account was telling. Road to Success is a podcast about resilience and the long road through a career, not a place for score-settling. She did not frame the story as a complaint about Verstappen, whose blunt “Does it matter?” was simply the spark rather than the offence. Her focus was on the question itself, and on her right to ask it.

That is the heart of what she was getting at. A reporter’s job is to ask the thing the audience is thinking, especially when the subject would rather it went unsaid. Brookes did that, stood by it, and paid a price that had nothing to do with the racing. By speaking about it openly, she has put the spotlight back where it belongs, on the behaviour of the people sending the messages rather than the woman holding the microphone.

As the grid heads to the Red Bull Ring for the Austrian Grand Prix, there will be more questions, more answers, and no doubt more clips. Brookes will be there to ask them. The hope, after an account as candid as this one, is that a few of the people quickest to hit send might take her advice and step back. It is, after all, sport.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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