Just days before Verstappen won his championship in Abu Dhabi, a Saudi-led coalition raid killed 18 civilians in a residential neighborhood in Yemen

Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen posed for a picture in front of a Ukrainian flag, wearing "No War" T-shirts, and declared that when a country is at war, it's not right to race there, according to a report by Declassified UK.

F1 organizers went a step further, canceling the Russian Grand Prix, the Haas F1 team dropping Russian Fertilizer company Uralkali as its title sponsor, and Nikita Mazepin - whose father is a majority shareholder in Uralkali - was dropped as a driver.

Verstappen's anti-war stance becomes even more interesting when taking into account that he won his last championship in December from the track at Abu Dhabi, in the UAE. The Emirates is currently part of the Saudi-led coalition on Yemen, which has committed countless massacres against civilians since the war began in 2015.

Although the sport took a political stance against Russia by stripping Haas Ferrari of its sponsor and slowest driver, it has done nothing to take a stance against the sport's title sponsor, Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco, whose branding is laid across every track. F1 organizers have in fact continuously ignored pleas from human rights groups to change circuits from those in Gulf countries.

To this day, none of the drivers dare mention the Yemen war.

It's not just the war on Yemen, but also the demolishing of entire neighborhoods without local consent, with those objecting risking imprisonment or worse, and mass executions in Saudi Arabia targeting the country's minorities.

Sportswashing

The Declassified UK report showed that F1's ruling body, the FIA, is now run by an Emirati, that several F1 constructors are financially supported by Gulf monarchies, and that MCLader is majority-owned by Bahrain's sovereign wealth fund and received a financial injection last year from the Saudi Public Investment Fund (SPIF).

Sportswashing

Read more: The Washington Post: PGA golfers who play in Saudi Arabia accept blood money

Read more: Sportswashing human rights violations