The unseen moment with Ocon which explains Verstappen’s shock Q2 exit
Red Bull and Max Verstappen furiously blamed race control following his surprise elimination in Q2. It was galling turn of events for Red Bull. When Q2 was first stopped because of Carlos Sainz Jnr’s crash, Verstappen was fourth and Sergio Perez was quickest in the other car. But both drivers fell into the drop zone as other drivers improved in the brief period when the session resumed before being stopped again when Lance Stroll crashed.
The team claim the delay between Stroll’s crash and the subsequent red flag both allowed other drivers to complete lap times, pushing Verstappen down the order, and prevented a restart which could have given him the opportunity to set a quicker time.
Both claims looks doubtful. Verstappen was vulnerable in 10th place when Stroll lost control of his car. At the same moment, Charles Leclerc was accelerating to the line to set the time which dropped Verstappen to 11th.
The gap between Stroll’s car hitting the barrier and Leclerc’s crossing the line was about a second. There was therefore no realistic chance that a red flag could have been shown before Verstappen fell into the drop zone.
An earlier red flag could have left enough time for a restart, but it would have lasted only one-and-a-half minutes at best. As it takes more than a minute for a car to leave the pits and reach the starting line, out of the 13 drivers who would have wanted to set a time, only a tiny number were ever going to. Given Red Bull’s garage is situated at the far end of the pit lane, Verstappen’s chances of getting a lap in under those circumstances were slim to none.
Race control have been surprisingly slow to deploy Safety Cars, Virtual Safety Car and red flags on many earlier occasions this year. The Azerbaijan Grand Prix was a notable example: Carlos Sainz Jnr and Sergio Perez’s crash littered the track with debris, yet the race was not neutralised for more than a minute. It is fair to question whether this is the correct approach from a safety point of view, but it’s not the reason Verstappen failed to reach Q3 today.
