Hamilton denies F1 rule change plea was aimed at Verstappen

Ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, seven-time world champion Hamilton suggested that the FIA should restrict when F1 teams can start developing their car for the following season. 

Hamilton’s comments come amid Red Bull’s dominant start to the 2023 season which has seen the reigning world champions win all eight races so far. 

Verstappen was quick to reject Hamilton’s idea, retorting that “life is unfair so we just have to deal with it.”

The two-time world champion then told Sky: “We weren’t talking about that when he was winning his championships, right? So I don’t think we should now.

“It’s normal of course [that] people behind us say these kinds of things, but they should also not forget when they were winning how it was looking.”

Hamilton acknowledged that he benefitted from a period of Mercedes dominance and stressed his suggestion was simply aimed at improving the spectacle. 

“It’s not like aimed at any one particular person or anything,” he said. “It’s just that obviously in my 17 years of being here… before even I got here, you would see periods of dominance.

“It continues to happen. I think as a sport, we do at some stage - I was really fortunate to have one of those periods that Max is having now but with the way it’s going, it will continue to happen over and over again.

“And I don’t think we need that in the sport. Just from my personal experience, when you’re so far ahead, you’re 100 points ahead, you don’t really need to do a lot more development on your car, so you can start earlier on your next car.

“With the budget cap that means spending that year’s car money on next year’s car, but if everyone had a cut-off, a time, everyone knew that it could then start – whatever date it is, October, probably too late, but August 1 [for example], something like that, that nobody has a head start and it’s a real race in that short space of time for the future car.

“I don’t know, maybe that would help everyone be more level and closer the following year.”

Hamilton added: “I might be wrong but something’s got to change because if you continue having- when we were winning world championships we could start earlier than everybody else.

“Then there are teams that weren’t competitive so then they didn’t bother working on that current car… you look at Brawn, they just focused fully on next year’s car from the beginning and then they turned up next year and blitzed everybody.

“And that shouldn’t be possible, in my opinion. It’s not for me to judge but it would be cool to see in the next 20 years that if we don’t have huge bands of time where one team can be too far ahead.

“We want to see better racing.”