Qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix has been red-flagged after four-time Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen crashed into the barriers at the first corner.
As he hit the brakes, the rear axle locked, leaving the Dutchman helpless as the car spun before it skidded over the gravel and crashed into the wall. Thankfully, the Red Bull driver was able to exit the car unassisted.
“Yep,” he confirmed to Red Bull when asked if he was OK. “The car just ******* locked on the rear axles. Fantastic.”
Although Verstappen confirmed he was OK to his race engineer, he was seen shaking his hand and wrist. Replays showed that he did not take his hands off the steering wheel at the time of the impact. He will likely visit the medical centre as a precaution.
Former driver and Sky Sports F1 analyst Martin Brundle explained that it was not driver error that caused the crash.
“That’s not a driver error,” the Briton said. “I was going to say ‘how often do you see Max Verstappen just make a fundamental error?’ He’s hit the brakes and it has just locked the rear axle. You can’t pull handbrakes on anymore in modern cars, in older ones you could.”
While the crash was clearly the last thing that Verstappen needed, the delay meant that Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli was able to get out for the remaining seven minutes of Q1. After suffering a violent crash during FP3 earlier today, it looked unlikely that the Brackley outfit would get the Italian’s car repaired in time.
While speaking to the media after the first two practice sessions in Melbourne, Verstappen was positive but explained that Red Bull still had “quite a bit of work to do”.
“Yeah, I mean we had quite a decent pre-season,” he said. “It’s been, I think, a big learning curve but we’ve been running well, we’ve been doing a lot of laps so there’s actually not really a lot that we could have wished for that could have gone better.
“But in terms of performance, I don’t know, I think we still have quite a bit of work to do to be up front but this is also something that I had already planned, for it to be like that.”
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