Why Max Verstappen was out of luck with Miami GP safety car

The Miami Grand Prix safety car for the Kevin Magnussen/Logan Sargeant accident was decisive in vaulting Lando Norris to the front and the foundation of his first grand prix victory. But there was some confusion about the sequencing and why the safety car picked up Verstappen and not race leader Norris. Some assumed that it had done so in error. But that was not the case. It was done this way because the priority was to bunch the pack up before it reached the accident scene. This maximised the time the track workers had to deal with the incident without risk of passing cars.

Due to the position of various cars, for the safety car to have waited for Norris would have entailed waving the pack past before the site of the incident and it would therefore still have been widely spaced. Only once the pack had passed the site did the safety car then wave everyone through in order to pick up Norris who by then had pitted and rejoined. Had it not done so, Norris would have been at the tail of the pack but a lap ahead of everyone.

It was just circumstantial that this series of events allowed Norris to extend his advantage on his in-lap by driving at the safety car delta speed (which is invariably faster than the safety car itself is travelling) and hence to exit his stop still leading.

Immediately prior to the safety car the unpitted Norris had been only 11sec clear of Verstappen (who had already pitted) with a pitstop taking around 20sec, so without the safety car Norris was not going to retain the lead after his stop. He was still lapping a few tenths faster on his old medium tyres than Verstappen could manage on his new hards and so that 11sec lead would have slowly increased for a while, but he wasn’t set to get it up to anything like the 20sec he’d have needed.

It was bad luck for Red Bull and Verstappen that it lost this race, nothing more, and there were no recriminations from either afterwards. “Shit happens,” as Verstappen put it later. “I mean, you win, you lose. I think we’re all used to that in racing… Sometimes the safety car works for you, sometimes it works against you. And even with that safety car, we still had all the opportunities to win today, but we were clearly not quick enough after that safety car. And once I realised that I just settled in and tried to come home in second.”