It is a known fact that Red Bull and Mercedes are not the best of friends in the F1 paddock. They had an acrimonious rivalry last season during the title fight between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton.

But during the Q/A session in the Talking Bull podcast, Verstappen compared his cats to Hamilton and Wolff. He explained to his teammate Sergio Perez why his cats are referred to as Hamilton and Wolff.

When asked if his cats were behaving, the Dutch driver replied, “In general, they have been behaving. They’ve been a bit moany, they have moaned quite a bit. The cats are moany. I joked that they are called Toto and Lewis, but they are actually called a bit better. It’s Jimmy’s from Monaco, the male; the female it’s called sassy…”

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These are certainly interesting names the world champion has given to his cats. He’s taking an indirect dig at the Mercedes duo in a tongue-in-cheek manner. On the racing front, he has just won his 5th race of the season in Baku on Sunday.

Max Verstappen is happy that his fortunes have turned since the start of 2022

The Dutch driver retired twice from the first 3 races of the season. But since then he has won 4 races in the past 5 Grand Prix. He mentioned that he’s really happy that his fortunes have turned around after the early heartbreaks in the season.

“Of course, we had our misfortune at the beginning of the year so we knew we had to play a bit of catch-up, but it seems like now it’s more or less evened out with the bad luck, and yes, you know you have to score points every single weekend if you want to really fight for the championship,” said Verstappen.

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The reigning world champion has taken a commanding lead in the title race after his win in Baku. Now his closest rival in the title race is his own teammate and not Charles Leclerc. So it would be interesting to see how he manages his lead from here onwards.