Sebastian Vettel has described the latest radio regulations imposed by the FIA as "complete bullshit" after clarification in Hungary.
After Nico Rosberg was hit with a ten-second time penalty for his Mercedes team telling him to avoid seventh gear at Silverstone, the FIA clarified how teams can deliver messages to their drivers. If a team informs its driver of a problem he must immediately be called into the pits, while any messages are allowed while the car is in the pit lane.
Asked for his opinion on the update to the radio regulations, Vettel replied: "Complete bullshit.
"I think all the radio issues we had, I think it’s a joke. I looked at the race after and I found as a spectator it was quite entertaining to hear a driver a little bit panicking on the radio and the team panicking at the same time. I think it puts the element of human being in our sport that arguably is very complicated and technical, so I think that’s the wrong way.
"There’s a lot of boring stuff on the radio that got banned, I don’t see the point, I think if you want to change it you should change the cars. I have no problem, let’s go back to V12s, manual gearbox, two buttons, one for pit speed limiter and one for radio just to confirm when we are coming in and other than that, not much electronics to look after, which there’s no point then to memorise a lot of things."
And Vettel says the radio messages are a result of the current technology required in Formula One, for which drivers are being unfairly penalised.
"I think all of the buttons that we have on the steering wheel today are there for a reason. It’s not like ‘ah yeah, we can build buttons, let’s put them on the steering wheel’, so I think if you just look at a 1995 steering wheel for example, or speak to a lot of experts that are still around in the paddock, what they raced with, it was a simpler just because the cars technology was a lot simpler.
"It’s not our mistake, as in the drivers, that the cars are so complicated these days that they need a manual this big and a steering wheel full of buttons to operate it. I think we’re going a little bit in the wrong way so that’s why I think it’s bad and we should just go back to being able to say what we want."
Romain Grosjean column: Safety car starts and summer breaks
Chris Medland's 2016 Hungarian Grand Prix preview
Technical snapshot - Silverstone
TECHNICAL: Under the skin of the Mercedes W07
Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter
