Red Bull was issued a warning by the stewards for releasing its car in an unsafe condition after Max Verstappen needed to throw a towel from his cockpit while on track during FP2 at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Verstappen was pictured moving to the inside of the track in the first sector and throwing the towel towards the grass verge, leaving it lying on the circuit for part of the second session. The Dutchman explained he chose not to leave the towel in the cockpit in case it got caught up in the pedals, and that the stewards understood his reasoning for discarding it.
“It’s just a towel that you normally wipe your face with when you come back in, so it was still in the car when it went out,” Verstappen said. “So, instead of it maybe potentially flying in between my feet, which is the dangerous part, I drove offline and I got rid of it in the safest way possible. I think the stewards understand that.”
The stewards did give Red Bull a warning, however, for the fact that the car left the garage with the towel still in the cockpit in the first place.
“Shortly after Car 1 was released from its garage, the driver of Car 1 was observed to have thrown a towel out of the cockpit,” the stewards’ decision read. “The driver explained that while in the garage, the face towel had slipped from his lap to the side of the seat and the team was unaware that it remained in the cockpit. When the driver realized it was there, he moved to the far right of the track and attempted to throw it as far away from the car and the track as possible.
“The Stewards determine that the towel had the potential to have become lodged in the footwell and to interfere with the driver’s ability to fully control the car and that therefore the car was released in an unsafe condition. The stewards consider this case to be distinguishable from a case where a hard (and therefore potentially dangerous) object is left in the cockpit and to be less severe than such a case. Hence a warning to the team is imposed.”
The incident was part of a difficult FP2 for Verstappen, as he ended up a lowly 14th on the timing screens, over a second adrift of Lando Norris’ leading time and 0.3s slower than teammate Yuki Tsunoda.
“Yeah, today was very tough. Just really low grip feeling. Not really a balance in the car,” he said. “It’s difficult to say what is the exact problem – nothing really worked. So, this is something that we have to investigate overnight because so far, of course, it hasn’t been our weekend.
“I’m sure we can do better, but today was quite bad. So, we need to really understand first where it is and what is causing us to have such a big problem with the car. I mean, McLaren looks really on it – they’re flying. But, naturally, of course I want to be a little bit closer to P3.”
