Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc have avoided penalties for their collision at the restart of the Spanish Grand Prix.
However the stewards noted the contact between the two drivers on the pit straight could have resulted in a “major crash”.
The incident occured after the Safety Car restart. Verstappen, who was running in third place at the time, had to correct a slide as he came out of the final corner when the race restarted. He had switched to the hard tyre compound while Leclerc was on a set of softs, which warmed up more quickly.
Leclerc drew alongside Verstappen on his right as they accelerated down the straight. As he moved ahead of the Red Bull, Leclerc moved towards Verstappen, and the pair briefly touched.
Verstappen immediately exclaimed on his radio: “Fuck, mate, he just rammed into me.”
“Charles just rammed into me on the straight,” he repeated afterwards.
After speaking to both drivers the stewards ruled each was partly to blame. “Car one [Verstappen] lost traction while navigating turn 14 and therefore had to defend his position on track against car 16 [Leclerc],” they noted.
“Car 16 proceeded to move to overtake car one on the start/finish straight. Both cars were moving slightly towards each other in the middle of the track and a minor collision occurred as a result.
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“Both drivers were of the view that this was an avoidable collision and could potentially have resulted in a major crash but neither driver was wholly or predominantly to blame.”
Leclerc said the collision occured because Verstappen was too unwilling to leave room for him.
“I don’t think there’s anything special,” he told the official F1 channel. “Max did a mistake out of the last corner, I went side by side.
“He tried to [put] me onto the dirty side of the track, as I would have done, which is normal. And then once I had the upper hand in terms of speed, I tried to take the slipstream a little bit.
“On the first move, I was willing to move a tiny bit. On the second move, he wasn’t. That is the difference of the contact or not, but at the end of the day that’s racing.
“I don’t think there’s any big problem into it.”
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