Don't worry about Max. He's not wound up or anything.
Verstappen angered by question about how he will race Hamilton | RACER
Of course he might find a way to have this motive him, and he might just make it work. I dunno know, though. Hard to imagine driving an F1 car competitively and
safely when you're this cranked up.
This has been coming for a lot of years. It's just never happened with the title protagonist since Senna. No one would complain about Schumacher because they were all terrified of him, but every bit of this has it's roots in the Prost/Senna feud, where the FIA let them get away with next to murder. Chop, block, swerve, run the other guy off the road......it's all been done before and no one cared.
Now it's a safety issue, even if drivers trying to kill each other was sort of excused as "racing,"
If that's the case, Hamilton and Max crashing is just another day, so why all the fuss?
The world changed with the carbon fiber tub. Now the cars are so safe no one is afraid any more, which makes them stupid. It's didn't take long to completely forget about Jules Bianchi, and go back to slicing each other up. They were doing it the weekend after he died and had a moment of silence for the guy at Hungary. "OK, he's dead. Forget about it and let's go chop block and swerve on each other.|
You know, everyone speeded under yellow, but even the FIA didn't see it as a problem until they got bad press, and then they had to crack down on it, just to appear they were all safety conscious and all.
I'm not saying the FIA doesn't care about safety, but the hypocrisy is breathtaking. They worry about dumb things like racing accidents where no one is at fault, and then turn a blind eye to Magnussen taking out LeClerc (Japan a few years ago). That could have killed them both and maybe sent a car flying into the pit, but Magnussen supposedly moved first (even though this is not in the rules), so for them it's ok to tear up four or five million dollars on a straight where they are supposed to be going, well, straight, not to even mention all those unprotected people in the pits.
There's simply no consistency in how they approach safety. Maybe their idea of safety is to make the cars as safe as possible, emasculate all the world's great circuits, and then let them try to kill each other. You can't fake entertainment, and this week's ratings will reflect that.
Back when you could get really hurt and death was a two or three times per year kind of thing, drivers raced like they cared about each other and raced like they wanted to be raced. That's the fair way to do it, but that's way in the past.
Indycar, by contrast has an even safer car with the aero screen, but they don't tolerate and of this stuff. You reactive block, and you get a drive through. Formula One could actually follow their own rules and have the same kind of thing, but they cling to that stupid "one move" rule that almost almost ends up with two or three moves.
I don't think there is a lot of point in improving safety if the drivers can still pull all these dirty tricks and the officials look the other way. They may as well put the grass back in, take off the halos, and maybe put a few trees in front of the guardrails. Take out the fuel cells too. We would certainly see some cleaner racing.