Lewis Hamilton faces firm pushback from McLaren for his stand against FIA's action

Lewis Hamilton has faced a firm pushback from the McLaren boss for criticizing the FIA's call to delay the start of the F1 Belgian GP. A pre-race shower meant that the race director took the call to delay the start of the race.

When the call was made, while there were drivers who were in favor of it, there were others, like Max Verstappen, who advocated for starting the race at the original time. Much to the chagrin of many, when the delayed start finally took place, it happened in conditions that already had parts of the track that were starting to dry.

Lewis Hamilton was also one of the voices who criticized the call by the FIA, as he revealed he was shouting that they were ready to go. McLaren boss Andrea Stella, however, disagreed with this view.

Commending the governing body on how it handled the race, Stella pointed out that the race was at Spa, where the danger factor is higher than usual. He told media, including Motorsportweek,

“I think today the race was managed in a very wise way by the FIA, because we knew that there was a lot of rain coming, and I think in a circuit like this, if you make the calls late, it may be too late, and the outcome could be a difficult outcome."

He added,

“So I think being on the forefoot is the right approach, and delaying the race allowed us to race in wet conditions, and then we went into dry, but in fairness, we are in Spa, we didn’t even know how long the dry race would have been, and we knew that there could have been wet conditions again at the end.

What Lewis Hamilton said about the race handling by the FIA

The weather forecast had prompted a lot of drivers to go for a higher downforce setup to make the most of the conditions. Lewis Hamilton was one of the drivers, as he started the race from the pit lane with a higher downforce setup. The advantage he could have had ideally was minimized, as the delay meant there was much less wet weather running. Talking to the media, the driver criticized the call as he said,

"We obviously started the race a little too late, I would say. I kept shouting, it’s ready to go, it’s ready to go. And they kept going round and round and round."

He added,

“So I think they were probably overreacting from the last race — where we asked them not to restart the race too early because visibility was bad."

Lewis Hamilton did have an impressive race as he made his way through the field and finished in P7.