Team boss angry at damage claim idea: 'Unnecessarily complicated'

After the dramatic opening phase of the Hungarian Grand Prix, where Valtteri Bottas took most of the front row of the grid with him, some wonder if it wouldn't be fair that teams could recover damages from those who caused them. One team boss, however, resolutely disagrees. Guenther Steiner. In his column, he explains that it will only make the sport more complex.

"I know this is a sore point at the moment and when it comes to the budget cap, racing was always going to be unpredictable and we wanted unpredictability", Steiner argues in his column on The Race. "We see when it rains that things become unpredictable and this is part of racing and the teams don’t expect these crashes to happen."

Steiner continued: "This will now make up the value of a driver in the future. A driver who does very few mistakes will have a higher value because there will be less damage and you can use that money for development rather than repair. This is all part of the game."

Even more complex than it already is

The team boss also sees such a rule further complicating FIA enforcement in the sport. Says Steiner: "If we put it in the rule that whoever runs somebody off is at fault for the damage, we then have the insurance assessor coming along to say whose fault it was and then all of a sudden we are employing another 20 people to be judges and stewards and working out how many percent is whose fault."