Sebastian Vettel responds to Hamilton’s Baku safety car accusations

Sebastian Vettel was accused of braking the safety car rules in Baku by Hamilton, as the Brit felt that Vettel was stopping and starting a bit too much, something that could have been detrimental to the cars behind him.

Hamilton did complain to Charlie about the entire incident and the plea was passed onto the stewards, who did deemed the entire incident to be within the laws.

“I think he controlled it very well,” said Whiting.

“It’s up to the leading driver to say when we go, unlike some other series that have what they call an acceleration zone, a place, a 300-400m zone where you can accelerate, you can’t do it before that, you can’t do it after that.

“But once it goes green, which we had, the safety car comes into the pits, all the light panels go green, then it’s up to the leader to decide when he’s going to go.

“This is a very tricky place, because they catch the safety car very quickly if they go too early – we saw that in F2 last year, or the year before. I think Seb did control it very well.

“There was a little bit of a complaint from Lewis that he was not going at a constant rate, but if you look down the field, there are quite a few places where that happens.

“To expect them all to go at one speed just doesn’t seem to happen. So as long as no one does anything that’s obviously dangerous, then I think we’re happy with what happened and I think he did control it rather well.” he concluded.

Vettel responded to Hamilton’s accusation by explaining that he drove the way that he did because of his cold tyres.

He also very cheekily slipped in the idea that maybe Formula 1 should move on from a Mercedes safety car to a Ferrari one now.

“The Safety Car should speed up,” Vettel said.

“It was difficult with our tyres to keep the temperature up.”

“Maybe after so many years of a Mercedes it would be nice to have a Ferrari Safety Car instead.” he added.