Magnussen: 'Dangerous restart has to be looked at'
Kevin Magnussen was one of several unwilling victims of the chaos that took place at the first restart in Sunday's Tuscan Grand Prix, the Haas driver denouncing a "dangerous" launch that should be looked at.
A safety car was deployed after a first lap crash that eliminated Max Verstappen and Pierre Gasly, with a rolling re-launch led by Valtteri Bottas from Lewis Hamilton.
As Bottas weaved to warm his tyres and slow the pack before pulling away, mayhem ensued down the field with a pack of cars already at racing speed while others up ahead suddenly slowed, producing an inevitable concertina effect.
"I haven’t watched it from all the cars ahead but my feeling is that somebody maybe backed off to try and go and gain the momentum," Magnussen explained.
"I don’t know for sure but certainly the guys in front of me, a couple of cars ahead, they went on full throttle for at least a couple of seconds and then they stopped again, right before the line.
"Then I had to stop, they guy behind me had to to stop and somebody didn’t react and there was a massive crash.
"So it has to be looked at for sure and improved for the future so we don’t have that situation again. It was certainly dangerous and something we want to avoid in future."
Ultimately, the pile-up left Magnussen, Carlos Sainz, Antonio Giovinazzi and Nicholas Latifi stranded.
Sainz echoed Magnussen's assessment of the carnage, adding that the events has reminded him of some "very nasty things from the past".
"It looks like someone in the midfield thought that the race had started or a lot of people thought the race had started," said Sainz.
"I was stuck behind an Alfa and we were both getting the slipstreams and racing already.
"As soon as everything happened in front I found three or four cars completely crossed in the middle of the straight and I just took a couple of them with me. So a very dangerous situation.
"It reminded me about very nasty things from the past. I don’t want to say nothing but something like this definitely needs to be analysed and find out what happened."
AlphaTauri's Dany Kvyat, who is suspected to have played a part in the crash that brought out the first red flag of the day, was summoned to the stewards after the race, for a potential breach of sporting reg 39.13 which relates to behaviour behind the safety car.
But Magnussen and Latifi were was also summoned to the stewards for allegedly breaching F1's restart rules, while Giovinazzi and Sainz were also set to visit race control.
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