Why Verstappen was wrong with complaint about Hamilton
Sunday’s race in Melbourne was punctuated by three red flags, the first of which was caused by a shunt for Williams driver Alex Albon that resulted in debris and gravel showering the track at Turn 6.
As the field were making their way back to the grid behind the Safety Car before the standing restart, a suspicious Verstappen was heard questioning whether his great rival was in breach of the rules.
“Mate is this more than 10 car lengths? Look, check it.” Verstappen asked over team radio.
After a brief pause, Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase replied, but his message was not relayed to the world feed.
“Looks like the Safety Car lights might be off, Max,” Lambiase said.
Hamilton, meanwhile, was wary about warm-up on the hard tyres and was desperate to get his temperatures into the right window ahead of the standing restart.
After raising his concerns about this to his race engineer Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington while following the Safety Car, Hamilton then asked at which point he would be allowed to slow down.
Hamilton wanted to drop back from the Safety Car in order to conduct a more aggressive combination of accelerating and braking throughout the remainder of the lap to generate sufficient heat into his tyres.
Hamilton’s Lap 9 team radio
PB: So this will be a standing start
LH: Are we following the Safety Car? No one’s going to get their tyres warm behind the Safety Car.
PB: Yeah, copy, we will have to, it is going to be a struggle.
PB: So you’ve got to stay ten car lengths until the lights go out, then you can control the pace.
LH: Safety Car needs to speed up.
LH: The Safety Car lights are out. Can I slow down?
PB: So yep, you have control of the pace. The Safety Car lights are out, you control it.
It wasn't the only time Verstappen had attempted to get Hamilton penalised during the race.
Just a few laps earlier, Verstappen had called Hamilton out for “pushing me off the track” during their opening lap skirmish.
The Dutchman reiterated his view that Hamilton had not properly followed the racing rules following the grand prix.
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