Max Verstappen claims he would “kick out” a driver who refused to race after a crash such as that suffered by Romain Grosjean in Bahrain.
The Haas driver was lucky to escape with only burns on his hands after his car split in half and burst into flames following a high-speed impact with the barrier on the opening lap of Sunday’s race.
Watching on in the pit-lane during the red flag, Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel admitted unhappiness at the continued replays of the crash on the TV broadcast.
Mercedes too also reportedly claimed they would have pulled out their cars if Grosjean had been seriously injured or worse.
But asked if a driver should be given the option to withdraw following a big accident, Verstappen was clear.
“I don’t get why you wouldn’t race,” the Dutchman said. “If I would be the team boss I would kick him out of the seat if the guy wouldn’t race.”
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Lewis Hamilton agreed with the sentiment of the Red Bull driver’s comments.
“We’re not the safety regulators. We’re here to do a job and we rely on the FIA who are aware of safety and we trust them implicitly. So no, I don’t think so.”
Responding to Verstappen on Twitter, F2 driver Jack Aitken, who was involved in the Spa race last year in which Anthoine Hubert was killed, argued seeing Grosjean walk away made the situation much better.
“I don’t wish upon anyone the experiences that would make him realise how wrong he could be,” the current Williams development driver wrote.
“It’s not anything more than saying we’re all human, and that scene was traumatic, especially not knowing Romain’s condition immediately.
“We’re here to race, yes, but not under any circumstances. Knowing he was ok certainly made it a lot easier for them, I’m sure.”
Haas team boss Guenther Steiner agreed, adding his view.
“You can have two opinions here, but my opinion is if it ended luckily, and nothing bad happened, why not show it to make sure people understand?” he said of the TV coverage.
“Yeah it was bad, but everybody is OK. That was how to deal with it.
“We wanted to get the news out as soon as possible to the people, Romain is OK, just because it’s difficult to contact family, friends, people who know us, people of the team.
“If we sent one message via TV and something like this, it’s much more powerful.
“I think showing it and showing him jumping out, yeah, it looks a little bit dramatic, but it ended good. So long as it ends good, I’m fine.
“For sure, if something bad happens, it shouldn’t be shown,” he noted. “I’m not an expert in TV ethics, but in my opinion, a good thing was shown.
“It was a bad accident, but we got lucky and everything ended OK. I wouldn’t say good, because things like this don’t end good. It was just OK.”
