F1 News: Max Verstappen Slams F1 – “Needs To Change”

Max Verstappen has told the press that he thinks F1 “needs to change” in order to allow the drivers to have some time away from work during the high-pressure week after seeing a huge increase in workload.

The current racing weekend consists of over 6 hours of track driving, but surrounding this is heavy amounts of press interviews, sponsor responsibilities, and post-race analysis. F1 has changed how these weekends are structured, removing media events from the Thursday and instead of having a more focused media morning on the Friday. But champion Max Verstappen has said that despite this, Thursday has just been filled with more work with Friday being equally as difficult.

“Thursday is very long,” Verstappen says. “Which officially is not really a day anymore, but for us, it’s the same amount or even more on a Thursday and even more on a Friday when you come in early.

“Coming in early is not a problem, but your whole day is longer, so with going to more races you would like to have a shorter weekend.

“But actually now with more races, we are also having more days we are at the track and doing stuff. That definitely needs to change.”

Verstappen’s Red Bull teammate Charles Leclerc mirrored his feelings towards the increase in workload:

“We are going towards more numbers of races but for some reason that we didn’t expect this year, Thursday and Friday have become a lot longer for the drivers.

“The amount of media that we are facing every day and the amount of time we are spending at the track on meetings and activities has increased a lot, so we are going to need to find a way to control this in a more efficient way.”