© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
After Max Verstappen criticised Lewis Hamilton’s early development ban proposal, Lewis says it was “not aimed at any one particular person”.
Ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton called for a rule which would prevent teams from developing next year’s cars early in the season.
Since the ability to develop next year’s car early directly benefits the most successful teams, this rule would hit Red Bull the hardest.
This caused Max Verstappen to criticise Hamilton and say “we weren’t talking about that when [Lewis] was winning his championships”.
While giving more details on his proposal, Lewis said it was not aimed at Verstappen.
“It’s not aimed at any one particular person or anything,” the Briton said.
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“It’s just obviously in my 17 years of being here, even before I got here, you see a period of time of dominance. And it continues to happen.
“I was really fortunate to have one of those periods that Max [Verstappen] is having now. But with the way it’s going, it will continue to happen over and over again. And I don’t think that we need that in sport.
“Just in my personal experience, when you’re so far ahead, when you’re 100 points ahead, you don’t really need to do a lot more development on your car, and you can start earlier on your next car.
“And with a budget cap that means spending that year’s money on the next year’s car.
“But if everyone had a time for example, if everyone knew when we can really start, whatever date it is – October is way too late probably, but 1 August, something like that – then no one has a head start, and then it’s a real race in that short space of time for the future car.
“I don’t know, maybe that would help everyone be closer the following year, maybe. I might be wrong.
“But something’s got to change. When we were winning world championships, we could start earlier than everybody else.”
Lewis added that switching to early development also benefits teams at the bottom of the grid, who have nothing to lose.
“And then there are teams that weren’t competitive. So then they just didn’t bother working on that current car.
“If you look at Brawn, they just focussed fully on the next year’s car from the beginning, and then they turned up next year and blitzed everybody. And that shouldn’t be possible, in my opinion.
“But it’d be cool to see in the next 20 years that we don’t have huge bands of time where one team leads too far ahead, because we want to see better racing,” Hamilton concluded.
