FIA defends safety car formation lap after Verstappen crash and driver backlash at Dutch GP

Max Verstappen crashed heavily at the exit of the final corner on the opening lap of the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, as a safety car formation lap followed by a standing start left drivers unable to generate sufficient tyre temperature on a damp track. The Red Bull driver admitted the mistake was entirely his own, believing he could get back on the throttle before discovering that section of the circuit was still too wet.

The chaos extended beyond Verstappen. Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto came close to losing his car in the same corner, narrowly avoiding the wall, while team-mate Nico Hulkenberg — who immediately radioed that he feared he was about to T-bone Bortoleto — somehow threaded through the incident unscathed.

“It was just that corner, if I’m very honest with you. It was full wets, that place. I think that’s why Max lost it and it was the same for me,” Bortoleto said after the race. “I was on the downside of the banking. I did a little reaction move to the left when I saw big smoke coming up ahead. And when I did that, I just went as well.”

Several drivers argued the rest of the circuit had already dried by the time the race started, making slick tyres and a standing start the correct calls — but questioned the logic of combining them with a safety car formation lap that prevented meaningful tyre preparation.

“If we would go the way we did with one lap behind the safety car and a standing start, then I would have preferred to just do a normal out-lap, so we would have pushed a bit faster,” Alpine’s Pierre Gasly told Motorsport.com. “I thought the point was to go at least once through the last corner and the banking with the safety car before doing the normal race start. And yeah, it was damp.”

Gasly argued the FIA should have chosen one of two conventional approaches: a rolling start behind the safety car, or a standing start preceded by a standard formation lap at race pace. “I think it was either no safety car and only one formation lap or with the safety car at least giving us one extra lap,” he said, adding that he expected drivers’ feedback to be reviewed ahead of the next round.

Red Bull stand-in Liam Lawson echoed that assessment, stating he had anticipated problems with the procedure before the lights even went out — and that he had deliberately left more margin than Verstappen through the final corner as a result. The FIA, for its part, explained that the safety car formation lap was chosen on safety grounds given the conditions at the time, though the governing body’s full reasoning was not detailed before the source material was cut off.