Hamilton and Verstappen enjoyed a tight battle on track during the race with the legendary Brit slowly closing in on the three-time world champion before eventually taking the chequered flag just over two seconds behind the Red Bull star, capping off an impressive performance.
Unfortunately for Hamilton, he walked away from the race empty-handed after his Mercedes car was judged to have an illegal ride height following a random inspection of the plank. Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc also suffered the same fate with the Monegasque driver disqualified after finishing in P6.
The disqualifications were controversial for multiple reasons, although the jeopardy of the situation was heightened by the current sprint race regulations, which lock in a driver’s set-up after qualifying on Friday, meaning teams cannot make tweaks after the second track session of the weekend.
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Discussing the idea of having two different parc fermés on race weekends, Verstappen told AMuS: “That’s another one of those things: the setup. You lock it in after the first practice session. If you’re wrong, you’re trapped in that car set-up for the rest of the weekend.
“That sucks. That happened to us last year in Brazil. This year we had a couple of good sprint weekends. Nevertheless, I wasn’t completely satisfied. With the ground clearance in Austin, for example.
“Mercedes and Ferrari certainly didn’t set their cars too low on purpose. But once you get on the wrong track, you can’t get away from it. You can only react with the tyre pressure. And if the tyre pressure is high, you’re completely lost. That’s annoying. If you want to continue to have sprints, you have to make changes from my point of view.”
Verstappen has been extremely vocal in his opposition to the sprint race experiment, although F1 bosses remain keen to push the idea. The 2024 calendar will – for the second year running – contain six sprint weekends, much to the Red Bull ace’s frustration.
“A sprint race more or less lets you know what’s going to happen the next day,” he continued. “Unless there are crazy circumstances. For example, a change in the weather. Normally you can judge the race pace after a sprint. I think that takes the tension away.”
