On Sunday, Mercedes had a start to the unit with an asterisk. George Russell overtook Max Verstappen in the first chicane, Lewis Hamilton enjoyed a valuable scalp in the third corner. However, the Red Bull pilot was not satisfied with the way the seven-time world champion overtook him. Apparently he didn’t pay attention to the rules.
Max Verstappen didn’t exactly have a disastrous start, but the Mercedes started out of the blocks a little faster. The Dutchman could not fault Russell’s overtaking maneuver, but that is not true of Lewis Hamilton’s attack. Verstappen he is of the opinion that the Briton did not leave him enough space on the outside and practically pushed him out. “He pushed me off the track! I was in front of him and he pushed me off the track,” he complained on the radio.
And although he still won in the end, the fight with Hamilton bothered him even after the race. “I tried to avoid the collision. The rules are very clear about what you have the right to do outside. It is clear that this was not followed, but that is OK.”
“We had good speed and still overtook them. However, this is something that will have to be taken into account at the next race as well,” pointed out Verstappen, who may open the topic in a few weeks in Azerbaijan at the riders’ briefing. There, a possible push off the track will have more serious consequences.
The FIA last updated the driving standards document at the end of last year. It says the following about overtaking on the inside of a corner: “For the defending car to have the obligation to leave enough space for the overtaking car, the overtaking car must have a significant part of the car next to the defending car. The overtaking maneuver must be completed in a safe and controlled manner, while the car must be allowed to stay within the limits of the track.”
“When deciding what a ‘substantial part’ of a car means when overtaking on the inside of a corner, among other factors, stewards will take into account whether the front wheel of the overtaking car is next to the second car before the apex of the corner,” written by the authors of the rules.
Max Verstappen he let himself be heard that he deliberately did not stick his elbows out too much at the beginning of the race, although the others were not so considerate. “I had a very poor start. And I was careful in the first round because I could lose a lot. However, they could gain a lot.”
After George Russell’s unluckily timed pit stop, Verstappen only had to deal with Hamilton. The Briton defended himself for a few rounds, but it didn’t help him much. Red Bull has a huge speed advantage. If we wanted to paraphrase the famous Spaniard, we could say that the Mercedes resembled a GP2 single-seater. Verstappen escaped him by almost three seconds in one lap. And it was painted.
But when race management decided to throw out a second red flag — and Verstappen’s ten-second advantage flew out the window — even the reigning champion got a chill. He probably still had a bad start in his memory. If he did it again, there would be serious consequences for him; there were only two laps left until the end of the race, during which it would not be possible to use the DRS system.
“You could see right away that we had good speed. We always had them within range and just waited for the DRS to have a chance to overtake them,” carried on Verstappen. “But yes, the red flags, but I don’t know… Maybe you can put up the first one, but I really don’t understand the second one. It was a bit of chaos, but we survived everything. Today our car had good speed again and we won, which is the most important thing.”
Verstappen finally revealed that his blood froze the most when he braked in the third sector and went all the way to the grass. In this one sector alone, the pursuers came closer to him by more than three seconds.
“I didn’t want to completely brake the tire there, so I went a little off the track. We had a good lead,” adds the winner of Sunday’s race. “It’s great to win here, this is my first triumph. Our team has also been waiting for this for a long time.”
