The Stewards do not consider this to be a typical case of “changing direction under braking” although it is our determination that the driver of Car 44 could have done more to avoid the collision.
The Stewards do not consider this to be a typical case of “changing direction under braking” although it is our determination that the driver of Car 44 could have done more to avoid the collision.
This race Verstappen seemingly got emotional about all that went wrong internally at Red Bull this season. We’ve seen him fuming on the radio before, but today it impacted his actual racecraft leading to mistakes we admittedly rarely see by Verstappen (some people mindlessly echo Crofty seemingly knowing exactly how much sleep Verstappen needs, lol).
Also, while I like GPs passive-aggressive banter, it didn’t really help to calm Verstappen down today. It likely made it worse.
I don’t think Hamilton could’ve done a lot more besides moving further to the outside, but I don’t think he expected Verstappen to lock up so it would’ve been insanely hard to react to. Calling this a racing incident is honestly fine I think. The divebomb was optimistic at best, but I’ll say that this was driver error instead of malicious intent or intentional rule-breaking.
While it’s still highly unlikely that Verstappen switches teams anytime soon, it might not be as far-fetched as we thought. I’d honestly love to see him in a different team like Mercedes.
Will be interesting to see how good Red Bull will be at Spa.