Following last weekend’s eventful United States Grand Prix, Max Verstappen has called for the FIA to implement a rule change going forwards, which could result on more drivers being disqualified.
Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were disqualified from the US GP after their cars were randomly selected for post-race checks, where it was discovered that their planks didn’t comply with the technical regulations.
To be more specific, it was discovered that the plank on their cars had excessive wear, something which was potentially caused by the sprint weekend.
As a result, Hamilton lost his second-place finish, whilst Leclerc had P5 taken from him.
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Verstappen doesn’t think that Mercedes or Ferrari tried to field an illegal car on purpose, with the Dutchman believing that it was simply a set-up error from both teams due to the limited time before parc ferme conditions are introduced when it’s a sprint weekend.
The FIA chose four cars at random after the race for checks, which included Verstappen who passed.
He admits that it’s “impossible” for every car to be checked by the FIA as otherwise “you only get the race result on Tuesday”, with the only way for it to be done being to hire “100 more people” to conduct the checks.
“The problem is that it’s just impossible to check everything,” Verstappen admitted, as reported by RaceFans.net.
“But the thought process from every team is no one wants to be illegal, so no one sets up their car to be illegal. Then, of course, you have these random checks that get carried out and 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 this kind of thing.”
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Whilst he doesn’t think Mercedes and Ferrari intended to cheat, Verstappen does think it should become mandatory for a team’s other car to be checked, should the first fail post-race checks.
In this case, the Red Bull driver thinks George Russell’s and Carlos Sainz’s cars should’ve also been subjected to FIA checks as “you always run quite similar set-ups”.
“When you check one car of the team and it’s illegal, then I think you should check the other one as well. That’s for me, the only thing.
“Because otherwise you DQ one, then the other one moves up one position where normally you always run quite similar set-ups.”