Verstappen and Hamilton question race control’s conservative calls in wet Belgian GP

Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton claimed race control’s handling of the rain-affected Belgian Grand Prix was too conservative.

The Red Bull driver said they should have started the race earlier than they did. Verstappen complained on his radio about the original decision to abandon the starting procedure when the field left the grid under wet conditions at Spa-Francorchamps.

While further rain fell, F1 waited an hour and 20 minutes before sending the cars around the circuit again. The race eventually resumed after further laps behind the Safety Car.

The FIA said the first decision to delay the start of the race was taken because a majority of drivers complained the lack of visibility was too dangerous. However after the race Verstappen claimed the race had started too late.

“We barely did any wet laps in the end, which in general, I think is a shame,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “I think we could have started way sooner, that’s not ideal.”

Verstappen ran a low-downforce configuration on his car earlier in the weekend but switched to a more conventional rear wing producing higher downforce levels in anticipation of the wet race. He said he found it hard to attack Charles Leclerc “partly because of the rear wing that we chose.”

“Of course, on the inters, we were a bit faster naturally also because of the set-up that we had on the car,” he explained. “It was just very tough to pass.

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“One time I was really close going into Eau Rouge, but you lose so much downforce when you are behind, the car becomes really unstable. So you couldn’t really keep it on the road.

“Then we went onto the slick tyres and to be honest, every lap, I just felt like Charles was actually pulling away a little bit. Then I think he had one big mistake where he lost maybe one, one-and-a-half seconds. So that’s why it looked like I was back in the fight. Realistically, I never really felt that I was in that fight.”

Hamilton, who finished seventh, said the conditions weren’t wet enough to require race control’s use of a rolling start. He felt it would have been safe to use a conventional standing start.

“I don’t think they needed to do a rolling start,” he said. “So I don’t really know why they did that one, because it had dried up quite a lot and the spray wasn’t that bad.”

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