Max Verstappen will have to serve a drive-through penalty at the start of the Italian Grand Prix as punishment for exiting the pits with an unsafe car after his engine cover came loose and left his car at high speed.
The incident occurred right at the end of the first part of qualifying in Monza, in which Verstappen had for much of the session not appeared on track due to technical problems. And the young Dutchman admitted that the cover detaching was down to the team’s rush to get him out before the session finished.
“We were really in a hurry,” he said afterwards. “Normally we wouldn’t get it done but I was quite surprised the team did a really good job in that.
“The bodywork was only like 50% from all the holes as I was told it would hold on because it’s quite strong, but it just got a bit too much vibrations out of the pit, [it’s] very thin carbon.”
Describing how the incident felt from the cockpit he said: “You just feel a little bit of vibration before and once I lost it I slowed down. Just a bit more cooling for the engine!”
Verstappen indicated too that when the engine cover came off he wasn’t seeking to set a lap time, as he went out “just to check the engine if everything was alright.”
Also, in a trying day for the team Verstappen also revealed that he used an already-used engine whose FIA seals had been broken, so that counts as an extra unit for the season’s allocation.
