Nico Hulkenberg and Carlos Sainz Jnr were among the Formula 1 drivers who branded the series’ special Monaco Grand Prix rules a failure.
The Sauber driver spent virtually his entire race stuck lapping at a slow pace because the drivers ahead of him had backed off tactically to help their team mates.
“It’s just been painful,” Hulkenberg told the official F1 channel. “[There’s] not much you can do, you’re just a passenger, you just sit there going slow, impossible to overtake. I’m not the only one, many guys were the victim of that.”
F1 introduced a special rule for this event only forcing drivers to use three different sets of tyres during the race. Hulkenberg said it clearly backfired and his race was “pretty dull.”
“I think it’s not the spectacle, and it didn’t give the spin, that I think Formula 1 was hoping that it would give this race,” he said. “[It’ll be] interesting to see and hear the echo afterwards, what people are going to say about it.”
Carlos Sainz Jnr, whose Williams teams were among those slowing the field tactically, was deeply unimpressed with how the race played out and said the rules forced people to manipulate their pace to gain an advantage.
“I don’t know [about] the front but in the midfield it backfired,” he told Sky. “I think it made even more manipulative [for] everyone, to try to get the two stops and the pit window.
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“I’m happy for F1 to try things and I’ve always been a massive fan of trying different things. We tried it, for me it didn’t work, at least in the midfield it didn’t and maybe we just need to forbid the pace manipulation the way we did.”
Sainz is concerned more teams will try similar tactics to manipulate the outcome of a race at other venues where overtaking is difficult.
“I must say this is not the way I like to race,” he said. “This is not a way I dream about racing around Monaco, never to see this kind of racing. At least when I was a kid, I didn’t see this manipulation of pace.
“But it looks like it’s becoming a trend now over the last five years [for] some team mates to have to play this game. We either come up with a solution or I think it will be the order of the day for the future.”
“The two-stop changed nothing around Monaco, people are still going to do what we did today,” he added. “People are still going to manipulate the final result with the driving.
“We either come up with a solution to not be able to manipulate the race pace the way we did today and the race outcome, or it will always be like this in Monaco.”
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