One argument followed Formula 1 from Silverstone to Spa: how should a Grand Prix end when disaster strikes late? The British Grand Prix crawled home behind the safety car after Max Verstappen crashed in the closing laps, and the fix that keeps coming up is a red flag to force a clean, green-flag finish. The drivers and pundits are anything but united on it.
Lewis Hamilton is leading the charge for change, citing a race he remembers fondly. "It happened in Australia, I think, one year. It was one of the best races," he said, arguing the mechanism already exists. "They have the power to do it, they've done it before, but definitely finishing under the safety car is just... I would be disappointed." For Hamilton, the loss is felt hardest in the grandstands: "I am disappointed being in the car and as an athlete, so I can only imagine how the fans feel."
David Coulthard's complaint is about speed as much as spectacle. The former race winner called the whole neutralisation process sluggish: "It all just takes way too long." The Silverstone ending, he said, was "so dull and so kind of something that we must be able to find a way around," and he backed the red-flag route outright: "Yeah, I think that is a solution, and I think that would give them the chance to reset everything."
Guenther Steiner doubted the FIA's software-error explanation for what happened at Silverstone and thought the officials could have shown more flexibility. "I would agree if the lapped cars have unlapped them at least half a lap, but there's only one lap to go, they will not catch them, so they will not be in the way. So we can start the race," Steiner said. "But obviously, the race director did what is written in the rule book."
The pushback comes from the cockpit. Charles Leclerc, who won the race, conceded it looked bad while admitting he was quietly grateful. "It's not great for the fans," he said. "In the helmet, I was kind of happy that there was not a restart to keep that win."
George Russell, second that day, argued the end of a race should be governed like any other part of it. "Nobody can plan for somebody to have an incident, and the way F1 deal with it shouldn't be any different at the end of the race compared to the start," he said. Toto Wolff put the principle bluntly: "Show follows sport and not the other way around."
The BBC's Andrew Benson spelled out the danger: a late red flag lets every car fit fresh tyres and can rewrite the result, and deciding when to wave it gives one official huge sway. "The race director can't just make up the rules," he wrote. "Otherwise, why have them?" The ghost of Abu Dhabi 2021 hangs over the whole conversation.
No rule change is on the table for now. But Spa's length and fickle skies make another late safety car a live possibility, so the argument travels on.
