Max Verstappen believes the duo of safety car interruptions at the Chinese Grand Prix made the race “less fun”. The first safety car was called when Stake F1’s Valtteri Bottas came to a stop on the circuit with a drivetrain issue. At the restart, Lance Stroll made contact with Daniel Ricciardo while a separate incident saw Yuki Tsunoda and Kevin Magnussen come together. Verstappen was heard over the team radio taking issue with the length of time it took to return to green flag conditions. “[It] just took a long time, I found, to get the first car cleared,” Verstappen explained, speaking to media including RacingNews365 . “And then I felt like we drove one more lap behind the safety car for nothing. So I was like, 'come on, speed up a bit'. “Then we had another safety car and for me it felt, again, that they took a long time to clear, because you want to race.”
Safety cars were 'a shame'
Some drivers, including Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc, pitted under the safety car and managed to reach the end of the race on a one-stop strategy. Verstappen believes that the safety car eliminated the prospect of having a further variety of strategies to create a more unpredictable end result. “Actually then I thought that because of the two safety cars it made it a little bit less fun because you would have seen probably more different strategies between the cars,” he said. “Now everyone was just driving more or less to the end, except I think Fernando [Alonso] was on a Soft [tyre] “[It] made it I guess a little bit more straightforward. So that was a bit of a shame, I guess.”
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