Brundle: Red Flags in Melbourne not deployed to 'whizz up the show'

Martin Brundle doesn't believe the whirl of red flags deployed in the Australian Grand Prix was rooted in race control's desire to "whizz up the show".

F1 fans at Albert Park witnessed on Sunday three red flags and a equal number of standings starts.

The first race stoppage came courtesy of an off by Alex Albon whose Williams hit the wall at Turn 6 and showered the track with gravel which required a thorough and safe clean-up process.

The event appeared to be heading into its closing laps without and further drama until Kevin Magnussen hit the wall at Turn 2 and scattered debris, which encouraged race control to wave the field back to the pitlane.

Finally, after a second restart and with only three racing laps to go, all hell broke loose as soon as the first corner where several cars veered off course as Carlos Sainz spun around his good friend Fernando Alonso.

The chaos eventually caught out both Alpine drivers who crashed together and eliminated themselves on the spot.

Race winner Max Verstappen and McLaren's Lando Norris were among those that questioned the red flags, suggesting they had been relied upon by race control to spice up proceedings.

Brundle was on the other side of that argument however, and pointed to the importance of clearing the track of all debris to minimize risk of damage or anything worse.

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"Absolutely not. I don’t think there was any instruction to whizz this show up when required," said the Sky F1 commentator.

"You have to walk a mile in the shoes of the people who are responsible. It is easy for us to sit on the sidelines going ‘should have done this, should have done that’.

"Back in 2009, Felipe Massa nearly died with a piece of someone else’s car coming through his cockpit.

"It is also a street circuit there with a lot of fans either side of the track and also marshals and medics that are down there.

"So, if there are pieces of debris on the track, you can’t have them flying through the air at a couple hundred miles per hour."

A report of a fan being hit by a piece of flying debris from Kevin Magnussen's Haas – and fortunately suffering only a very superficial cut on the arm – gives fuel to Brundle's argument.

The former F1 driver nevertheless agreed that, in the instance of Albon's crash, a simple safety car period would have been sufficient to clear the track.

"I thought when Alex Albon went off they could perhaps have just used a Safety Car and swept the gravel up and cleared the car away," he said.

"A red flag perhaps seemed slightly unnecessary but towards the end of the race, we had a tyre and wheel on the track and lots of debris.

"I am absolutely confident no one is in there going ‘hey, let’s make this a little bit more fun’.

"Whether we are making crystal-clear decisions in the pressure of the moment, obviously we lost Charlie Whiting in Melbourne where he died sadly, then we went through the Michael Masi phase which everybody knows about, especially Abu Dhabi 2021.

"Then they shared the role, now we have a guy called Niels Wittich.

"Is he making the right decisions? But at the end of the day, we are sitting here on a Monday morning and we are not one per cent responsible if somebody was killed or injured."

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