Following the anticlimactic safety car finish at the British Grand Prix, former Formula 1 driver David Coulthard has heavily criticised the championship’s current procedures.
During the Up To Speed podcast, the 13-time grand prix winner argued the safety car process is unnecessarily slow and backed a proposal to mandate automatic red flags for incidents within the final 10 laps of a race.
The safety car was deployed at Silverstone when Red Bull’s Max Verstappen became beached at Stowe corner on lap 48 of 52. While Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton pitted for fresh tyres, Mercedes’ George Russell stayed out, taking second from the seven-time champion. However, the anticipated restart never came.
Despite an erroneous television graphic suggesting a final-lap sprint, the race ended behind the safety car as there were not enough laps remaining to complete the full procedures. Leclerc claimed victory in front of a frustrated crowd and was joined on the podium by Russell in second and Hamilton in third.
“So dull and so kind of something that we must be able to find a way around,” Coulthard explained. “We have an almost 6km race track. We have an incident in one corner of that race track. A safety car is deployed pretty quickly once they’ve decided that the car is not going to be able to get out of the gravel.
“We then spend a few laps waiting on the pack catching the safety car, and then once it’s with the safety car, we then wait for the race director to tell the drivers that they can overtake the safety car. It all just takes way too long.
“We’re Formula 1. We change wheels in 2.2 seconds, or the world record previously was 1.8 seconds. We develop the fastest racing cars in the world. As soon as the safety car is out there, they could start that process.
“Because you know with the GPS data where the cars are on track, as long as people respect the speed at which they’re going through the double yellow area, it’s completely within our capability to do that whole process faster.
The Safety Car
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images
“It would have avoided Abu Dhabi ’21, and it would have avoided what we saw there at the weekend.”
When co-host Will Buxton proposed the idea of automatically red-flagging a race if there is an incident within the last 10 laps, Coulthard added: “Yeah, I think that is a solution, and I think that would give them the chance to reset everything.
“I also think it’s not beyond the capabilities of Formula 1 to do it on track and to do it quickly. There are only 22 cars, and that’s assuming they’re all running at that point. It isn’t that complicated. These are the best drivers in the world.
“They drive at 200 miles an hour, a few feet, inches, metres, centimetres, whatever you want to use off the back of another car. And yet somehow when there’s an incident in one corner, it’s like they’re kindergarten kids and we have to really treat them in a way that you’re not allowed to do certain things.”
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