Verstappen rejects Hamilton's proposal for F1 development limit

Max Verstappen gave a thumbs down to Lewis Hamilton's idea of the FIA imposing on teams a mandatory starting date to begin the development of their  following-year machines.

Hamilton tabled the proposal as a potential way to help curtail a team's dominance in F1, arguing that everybody starting their development work each year from the same zero-hour date would help level the playing field.

The Mercedes driver expressed the idea while addressing Red Bull's total supremacy this season.

"It's not aimed at any one particular person or anything," Hamilton said in Austria on Thursday.

"It's just obviously in my 17 years of being here, even before I got here, you see a period of time of dominance. And it continues to happen.

"I was really fortunate to have one of those periods that Max is having now. But with the way it's going, it will continue to happen over and over again. And I don't think that we need that in sport."

• Read also: Hamilton offers radical idea to curtail team dominance in F1

While there is perhaps something to take away from the Briton's suggestion, Verstappen rightly noted that such an idea never came to the fore during Mercedes' years of dominance in the sport.

"We weren't talking about this when he was winning and I don't think we should now," Verstappen told Sky Sports F1.

"This is just how Formula 1 works. When you have a competitive car, that's great, but at one point you have to look ahead to the next year, of course.

“It’s normal that people behind us say these kind of things. But they should also not forget when they were winning how it was looking.

A pragmatic Verstappen admitted that sometimes situations in F1 are unfair, just as in life.

"That’s how it goes in F1," concluded the Dutchman. "Life is unfair as well. It’s not only in Formula 1.

"Like I said, a lot of things are unfair, so we just have to deal with it."

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner doesn't believe that Hamilton's idea is realistic or even possible to police.

"I think it would be an incredibly hard thing to police," said Horner. "How on Earth could you say, ‘right, go!’? How do you prevent people thinking about or working on next year’s cars?"

Horner also argued that F1's current Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions, which limits wind tunnel and and CFD time, is working well as a tool to level teams' development work.

"I think we have a handicap system in Formula 1 through the reduction of wind tunnel time," he said. “Franz [Tost, AlphaTauri team principal] has almost double the amount of time that we have. That is a significant handicap.

"I think that Aston Martin will start to feel that as it’s reset at the midpoint of the year.

"And for us, we have to pick and choose very, very, sparingly what are we going to commit to putting through the wind tunnel.

"So it will have an effect. And that system didn’t exist years ago. So we will see that playing."

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