Formula One Race Director, Michael Masi, has said it’s incidents like Hamilton and Verstappen’s at Monza on Sunday that incite the long list of safety measures that are in place today.
The incident on Lap 27, saw Verstappen’s Red Bull mount the kerb, propel into the air, and then land on Hamilton’s Mercedes with one of the rear wheels hitting the British driver’s helmet behind the halo.
Masi said that although this wasn’t a high G crash, they will be investigating it in depth to ensure things like this can’t happen again.
“Incidents that are different, so it’s not necessarily high G impacts or anything like that, but are unusual, we do look at,” he said.
“Our safety department does look at them in detail, investigate and see what we can learn and what we can improve for the future.
“That’s how we have a whole lot of the safety features that we have today and will continue to evolve into the future.
“We are already collecting all of the data, so we have all of the information and that will all go to our safety department together with any photographs and anything else we have along the way.”
Speaking after the race Max Verstappen touched on the incident and said he was “pushed onto the orange sausage kerb.”
“We were racing for position today but you need two people to work together to make the corner and Lewis just kept squeezing until there wasn’t room anymore for two cars and that’s when we crashed.
“When he exited the pits, he started to squeeze me going into Turn 1 so I had to use the green part of the track.
“It was very tight but there was room for me to go around the outside and then I was pushed onto the orange sausage kerb.
“I was there to try and race hard but fair. I don’t fully agree with the penalty as I believe it was a racing incident. It’s very unfortunate what happened today but we are both professionals and so we will move on.”
Lewis Hamilton then gave his point of view and said; “From what I remember, after I came out of the pits, I saw Max coming and I made sure I left a car’s width on the outside for him.
“I went into Turn 1 and I was ahead, and I was ahead going into Turn 2, and then all of a sudden, he was on top of me.
“All in all, not a great end to the weekend for me but it was good to see that Valtteri carried the Team with his amazing recovery drive.
“Coming from the back all the way to the podium on a track like this is not easy.”
