McLaren applaud FIA delay to "dangerous" pit stop technical directive

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl has insisted the FIA's delay in introducing the technical directive aimed at making pit stops safer "makes sense".

The TD was initially planned on being made effective from this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix, with a car's release enabled after a humanly possible time has expired, in the same way human reaction times provide a tolerance at the start of a race.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner had previously labelled the directive as "dangerous".

"It is the duty of the competitor to ensure the car is safe and the penalty for a wheel not being fixed is you have to stop the car immediately, so it is a brutal punishment if you haven't got all four wheels securely and safely fastened," said Horner.

"What the technical directive is trying to achieve, I am not quite sure because I think there is an awful lot of complexity to it."

Ahead of the race at Silverstone, however, it was announced the proposals would be revised, with the implementation delayed until F1 heads to Belgium after the summer break.

Asked if he was happy with the delay, Seidl replied: "Yeah, I think it was a good constructive discussion between the teams and the FIA.

"Due to the special situation that we are in also with Covid it is not so easy to go back to the factories at the moment, train together with the crew for the changes that were in the TD initially.

"It makes sense to delay it and use the break to give every team the chance to be prepared for the change."

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