Max Verstappen wins third consecutive Formula One world championship
Max Verstappen has suggested that George Russell and Carlos Sainz were fortunate not to get disqualified at the United States Grand Prix. The Red Bull star believes that the punishment handed out to Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc should have automatically led to a check on their team-mate’s cars.
Hamilton and Leclerc were stripped of their respective second and sixth-place finishes at Circuit of the Americas for excessive skid block wear. The bumpy track posed a problem for teams in terms of how low to set their ride height while staying within the rules.
Only four cars were inspected by the FIA, with two of them – Hamilton’s and Leclerc’s – falling foul of the regulations. While Verstappen concedes that checking over every single car on the grid is not realistic, he has made it clear that any similarity in set-up should naturally lead to the team’s second car also getting a once-over.
“The problem is that it’s just impossible to check everything,” he said. “No one sets up the car to be illegal. But then of course you have these random checks that get carried out.
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“That’s just how it goes. You can’t check every car for every single part of the car. Otherwise we need 100 more people to do these kind of things. I think the only thing is when you check one car of the team and it’s illegal, then I think you should check the other one as well.
“That for me is the only thing. Otherwise you DQ one, and the other one moves up one position, when normally you always run quite similar set-ups.”
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Verstappen’s recommendation could also have seen Ferrari star Sainz and Mercedes ace Russell disqualified, providing his theory turned out to be true. As it panned out, Sainz took 15 points and the bottom step on the podium, while Russell banked 10 points for being bumped up to fifth.
The sprint format deployed in Austin meant that teams only had one practice session before fine-tuning their cars. Verstappen is not a fan, and the reigning three-time world champion has called on the FIA to scrap the idea altogether.
“I think we should just get rid of the Sprint weekend, and then everyone can set up their cars normally,” he said. “Because it wouldn’t have happened if we would have had a normal race weekend I think.
“These things only happen really I think when you have a Sprint weekend when everything is so rushed between FP1 and qualifying, you think ‘uhhh I think we might be OK’. From our side, I think we went a bit too conservative, but that of course is still better than the other way.”
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