Lewis Hamilton says FIA ‘overreacted’ after lengthy rain delay in Spa

Lewis Hamilton said the FIA was “overreacting” in its decision to delay the start of the Belgian Grand Prix.

FIA race director Rui Marques has had back-to-back wet races to contend with, but has come in for criticism after delaying the race in Spa for over an hour.

Lewis Hamilton casts verdict of delayed Belgian GP

After the initial formation lap was completed, the FIA made the call to red flag the race, leaving drivers waiting in the garages for the eventual start over an hour later.

Hamilton believes it was “overreacting” to the previous race in Silverstone and suggested comments from the drivers up front swayed the decision.

“I kept shouting ‘it’s ready to go’ and they kept going around and around,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com “So I think they were probably overreacting from the last race where we asked them not to stop and restart the race too early because the visibility was bad. We didn’t need a rolling start.

“As soon as someone up ahead said visibility was really bad, which it wasn’t great but it wasn’t as bad as the last race, and I think they just waited, just to be sure.

“I think they still did a good job. Of course, we did miss some of the extreme wet racing, which I think would have been nice, but for some reason, the spray here is really, or this year at least, it’s like going through fog. I don’t know what we’re going to do to try and fix it.”

After the race did get started, Hamilton produced an excellent recovery drive to rise from a pit lane start to seventh.

The Ferrari driver put his improvement from Saturday to Sunday down to overnight setup changes.

More reaction from the race in Belgium

Max Verstappen criticises FIA decision after rain delay to Belgian GP

Lando Norris ‘couldn’t have won’ Belgian GP in Oscar Piastri admission

“Obviously it’s challenging, being all the way back there. I made some changes overnight. So much in the build-up to this week, obviously, with the upgrade that we have. There’s two elements to it. One of those elements, we had it to test back in Montreal, but I didn’t end up testing it.

“Charles did and he ended up using part of it a couple of races. So he did a great job today, and he’s feeling more acclimatised. For me, as it was the first time using it, had that spin, and that caught me out.

“We also did a change of engineers so we’re both in the deep end, basically and I think we did a really good job overnight to rectify some of those [issues]. Tweak it, fine-tune it, and the car was so much better. So I had a lot of fun trying to make my way through.”

Read next: George Russell labels Belgian GP ‘worst performance of the season’ in Mercedes demand