Speaking on Twitch, Verstappen said: “I lost one cat for like three or four hours, I didn’t know where it was. I was walking around and suddenly the cat starts meowing behind a door so I was like, ‘Oh dear!’.

“It was a little closet room so it’s only a one-way entrance. I’m trying to open the door but the door wasn’t want to open because a baby bed had fallen down behind the door in the storage room.

Max Verstappen had to smash a hole into his door (Image: MAX VERSTAPPEN)

“The door was completely locked because the cat had pushed the bed down. There was no way to open the door. I tried everything so I had to make a lovely hole in the door with a hammer!

“The cat must have been so scared, though, with all that noise in the dark. I almost broke my shoulder trying to go through the door – it didn’t really work out.”

Verstappen continued: “So now I have a door with a massive hole in it! I tried [to take it off the hinges] but the thing is, you have to open the door slightly and unhook it.

“I’m probably not the best guy out there to repair or rip something apart. I do know that.”

One member of the stream added: “If you want your door taken off, Max is the last person to ask!” The Miami Grand Prix champion jokingly responded: “It depends how you want it taken out!”

Verstappen’s pet is not the only cat to catch the attention in F1 this season. At the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, a safety car was forced to swerve to avoid a cat, although Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was the only driver to spot the animal.

Responding to journalists who had misheard him telling his team there was a cat, rather than a power cut in his car, Leclerc said: “Absolutely not, I said there was a cat! Which was different. There was a cat in the middle of the road.

“The safety car had to stop. But I think I was the only one who saw that. On the exit of Turn 1 there was a cat. The safety car braked, it wasn’t too bad.”