Max Verstappen British GP crash explained by telemetry data

After a great recovery in the first part of the race, Max Verstappen came from seventh into a position to fight for the podium at British GP, until lap 48 when the Dutchman ended up in the gravel at Stowe.

Whether the cause of the accident was a technical problem with the car once again, or if Max made a driver error trying to catch Lewis, we discover with the help of telemetry data.

What caused Max Verstappen to crash out of the British GP?

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Verstappen secured a fight for the podium with a great first stint. After overtaking his teammate, he had George Russell and Lewis Hamilton ahead of him, who were his direct rivals for the final spot on the podium.

In that battle, Verstappen was the one who took a different approach regarding strategy. He went into the pit stop seven laps before his rivals and tried to gain a position with an undercut.

Due to the difficulties of warming up the hard C1 tyres and finding a good pace early in the stint, the undercut strategy is not very successful at Silverstone, and teams usually try to gain an advantage in other ways.

But in this case, Verstappen did gain track position and found himself ahead of Russell and Hamilton, who also had to serve a 5-second penalty, which only helped the Red Bull driver.

It didn’t take long for Hamilton and Russell to catch Verstappen on the fresh rubber, but their battle with each other on laps 29 and 31 slowed them down a lot, which the Dutchman still couldn’t exploit due to a weaker pace.

And from the graph below, you can see the weaker pace the Dutchman had on the hard tyres; from the beginning of the stint on the C1 for all three drivers, Verstappen was simply too slow.

Soon after, Hamilton overtook his old rival, while Russell ended his participation in this battle courtesy of a puncture.

Because of the very poor pace on the hard tyres, Red Bull took advantage of a brief VSC on lap 39, pitting Verstappen back onto the medium tyres.

What should also be kept in mind is that Red Bull was the only one of the leading teams to have two sets of new medium tyres – it very likely knew it would have difficulties on the hard compound.

And after just a few laps on the mediums, where Max’s pace looked good again, he went off at the fast Stowe corner.

So, what can we see from the data?

What is noticeable is that Verstappen braked later on the lap when he went off the track (white colour) compared to the lap before (blue colour). However, the difference is so small that it is almost impossible for it to cause such a loss of grip.

Moreover, Verstappen actually entered the corner with a lower speed before the crash than he did the lap before. Very obviously, we rule out the possibility of a driver error here because there is simply no data that would point to it.

What remains for us is a technical failure on the car.

As Max himself said after the race, this incident strongly resembles the one from qualifying in Austria, where the rear end of the car simply lost grip all of a sudden.

“Like Austria, but different fault, let’s say it like that, but the same outcome,” he told PlanetF1.com and others.

“Again, while turning into the corner, the rear wing is not fully attaching, and you lose a lot of downforce for that, so I just spin off the track.”

If we look at the onboard camera, we can also see how early in the corner this snap occurs.

On every rear wing, especially in the case of the “macarena” design used by Red Bull and Ferrari, there is a greater difference in downforce on the rear axle between two modes.

If you make a mistake with the timing and if you don’t give the car enough time to restore its optimal aerodynamic balance, you can very easily get an accident like this, especially if you are at Silverstone.

What remains undiscovered is whether Max would have caught Hamilton and seized 3rd place.

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After the second pit stop and rejoining on the soft tyres, Verstappen had an 11-second deficit relative to the Briton. The Red Bull driver started running good laps, and this gap dropped to around 6.5 seconds after just 5 laps.

But then it plateaued. We can also see from the data how his lap times were getting worse, while Lewis was consistently faster as his car became lighter.

Considering that Max ended his race just 4 laps before the end, the chances that he would have caught Hamilton are very minimal.

In the end, despite the good result Max could have had, it seems that the current problems within his team are greater than the points deficit itself. Max’s frustration came not so much from the fact that he didn’t finish the race, but because the team didn’t listen to him and change the car setup before the race.

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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