F1 | Herbert: “10 seconds is the hardest penalty we could give to Max”

The collision between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, which decided the outcome of Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix, inevitably sparked a heated debate. The Red Bull driver returned to the braking moves for which he was much criticized before he started racking up a series of victories.

But, even if the stewards blamed him for the episode that prevented both of them from taking home the victory, many considered that the penalty of only 10″ was too small for a situation of this type: after an initial contact when he tried to move wide towards the McLaren driver near the braking point of turn 3, a second contact occurred which then definitively took Lando off the track, also damaging his front wing. Furthermore, when both were travelling with already punctured tyres, he forced his rival to put two wheels in the grass on the descent that leads to turn 4.

Johnny Herbert, who was part of the commission of stewards at the Red Bull Ring on Sunday, also intervened on the subject. In an interview with Coin Poker, the former British driver clearly explained that it was not possible to impose a higher sanction based on the rules imposed by the FIA. And he started from his vision of the accident.

“It was Max’s fault. He’s a difficult driver. He’s very, very difficult to beat. He intimidates everyone. Intimidation is something that Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna have always done. When you’re in front of Max like he’s driving today, if you’re Lando you have to say: ‘I’m here. I’m next to you. You’re trying to throw me off the circuit. And I’m not moving.’ Lando did the right thing. He didn’t move. He didn’t have to. Some people said he could have moved. But that’s not how you beat Max or win a Grand Prix,” Herbert said.

Among those who had called for a more severe penalty for Verstappen was McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, but Herbert clarified the reasons that led him and his colleagues to only give a 10-second penalty to the three-time world champion.

“It’s the toughest penalty you can give under the FIA ​​guidelines, which we operate under as stewards. McLaren said it should have been tougher, but that’s the game of all the teams. If someone had spun or rolled, I don’t know if that would have changed things. What happened was that a driver was forced off the circuit or caused an accident. That was the maximum penalty we could have given,” he explained.

“It’s about consistency. We have to respect the FIA ​​rules, which say if a car makes contact with another car, there’s a ten-second penalty. That’s the consistency you need. More extreme behavior doesn’t work. It was a tough race and one driver made a small mistake in squeezing the other. That led to contact. There’s no progressive scale of penalties, because it becomes a bigger and more subjective problem. If you try to slice an incident, you create more problems, then you create more inconsistency and everyone becomes more unhappy,” he added.

The incident occurred just as the stewards had taken the decision to also hand Norris a five-second penalty for going out of track limits in one of the previous attack attempts: “As we were watching it, we immediately wondered whose fault it was. And it was Max. The interesting thing is that at that moment we were about to penalise Lando because he had gone out of track limits four times and we gave him a five-second penalty literally the moment they made contact. We were dealing with that when the contact happened, I looked up and saw the tyres out of order”.

Finally, Herbert also had his say on Verstappen’s movements when braking: “The good thing about someone like Max is that, even if he doesn’t agree, he will find a way to use his weapons differently. As stewards, we looked at his braking behaviour and it wasn’t clear. It was smart and fair and it just made it a little bit more difficult for Lando to choose whether to go left or right in a particular corner. He will always adapt in some way and find another way to do it, but he will continue to put the same pressure on whoever his opponent is.”

“Max now knows that he can’t put that much pressure on Lando and expect him to move, that Lando will react. Up until Austria, Max had always won. Now he’s not winning. It will be interesting to see how Lando reacts. He’ll be in a better position now after what happened. He’s realised that he knows he has the ability to beat Max at his own game. It will be fascinating to watch,” he concluded.