Following a very wet track at the time of race start for the Belgian Grand Prix, the FIA decided to wait quite a while before giving the go-ahead. The grid drove off at the initial start time behind the safety car to assess the track conditions. During this formation lap, drivers discovered that visibility was too poor to start the race. The race start was aborted, and the session was red-flagged to give the track time to dry.
While this was the right choice as drivers had no visibility going up some of the most dangerous corners on the calendar, what happened next was the wrong choice, according to world champions Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. The FIA waited a full hour before giving the 15-minute warning to start the race. By this time, the track was almost completely dry with only minimal spray coming off the cars.
Race Direction waited too long to start the race
The long wait to start the race was reminiscent of the 2021 race at Spa-Francorchamps. In this case, the rain was not as heavy, with only short, intense showers coating the track with water. However, the long waiting period meant that we only had about 10 laps of inter tyres. This ruined what could have been an iconic wet-weather race, which separated the boys from the men.
After the race, Max Verstappen was critical of the race director’s decisions, stating that he would’ve liked to start at the original start time. The Dutchman shared his view on the aborted race start and gave a possible solution for the future:
“Of course, between Turn 1 [La Source] and 5 [Les Combes] was quite a bit of water, but if you do two or three laps behind the safety car, then it would have been a lot more clear, and the rest of the track was, anyway, ready to go.”
Following the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, the race director had received complaints from drivers about restarting too soon. There were several heavy crashes in the intense wet. For example, Isack Hadjar crashed into Kimi Antonelli because he couldn’t see him through the falling rain and spray. With these complaints in mind, the race director had promised to play it safer at Spa.
The race director was too safe this time around at Spa
While Max Verstappen agreed with the decision to be more cautious in the future, he thinks that the race director went way too safe at Spa. He commented further, saying it doesn’t make sense to wait this long to start a race:
“Then it’s better to say: ‘You know what? Let’s wait until it’s completely dry and then we just start on slicks.’ Because this is not really wet-weather racing for me.”
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While Verstappen and Hamilton don’t always see eye to eye, in this case, they couldn’t wait to go racing at a wet Spa. Hamilton has always delivered when the track is wet and slippery. So it doesn’t come as a shock that the 7-time world champion would’ve rather raced sooner rather than later:
“We obviously started the race a little too late, I would say, I kept shouting like ‘it’s ready to go, it’s ready to go’. And they kept going round and round.”
The result of this was that the Belgian Grand Prix wasn’t too exciting, as we saw barely any action. The only driver making inroads was Lewis Hamilton, who went from a pit lane start to P7.
