Max Verstappen has torn into the sprint format once again following the events of the United States Grand Prix last Sunday.
Photo credit: Red Bull Content Pool
Lewis Hamilton (P2) and Charles Leclerc (P6) got disqualified as both of their cars failed a plank check post-race on Sunday. The cars of Verstappen and Norris got checked as well and passed.
Speaking on media day ahead of the Mexico City Grand Prix, Verstappen believes the teams only having 60 minutes on a sprint weekend to tune their cars before getting locked into parc fermé was a huge factor in what happened.
“Of course nobody tries to do it on purpose, but because of the sprint format, you only have one practice session to nail everything.
“Once you are in the wrong [with set-up], there’s nothing you can do, the only thing you can is bump on the tyre pressure — but then you’re driving around on balloon tyres.
“It is not what you want to see for them, but also as a team, we know that dropping the car gives you that performance, but it is because of the whole format that you put yourself in that position because normally, I don’t think anyone in a normal weekend would run like that.
Attention then turned to whether all cars should be checked post-race. The 26-year-old Dutchman believes that is impossible.
“But then you get the race result on Tuesday, I guess, when you have to check every car.
“The problem is that it’s just impossible to check everything, but I think the thought process from every team is that no one wants to be illegal. So no one sets up the car to be illegal.
“But then of course you have these random checks that get carried out. I mean sometimes it’s the top four, sometimes it’s in the middle of the field, the back. 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.”
However, the three-time defending World Champion believes that if any car fails a test, the other car of that team should be checked as well as they’re run very similarly.
The disqualifications of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc allowed George Russell and Carlos Sainz to gain positions as their cars did not get tested.
“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.”
Verstappen’s attention returned to the sprint format and why it creates unnecessary problems for the teams, potentially leading to disqualifications.
“I think we should just get rid of the sprint weekend, and then everyone can set up their cars normally. 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 in-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.”
