Did Max Verstappen Commit Attempted Murder at the Italian Grand Prix in 2021

 The Italian Grand Prix run in Monza, Italy on September 12, 2021 featured a number of interesting events. At the start of the race Mclaren's Daniel Riccardo managed to get ahead of the Red Bull of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamiton starting on the hard tires was stuck behind the other Mclaren of Lando Norris in his Mercedes. A number of drivers recieved penalties for causing collisons including Nikita Mazepin who managed to get into a collision with his teammate. Mazepin is now 21st in a 20 driver championship.

The biggest incident happened after the pit stops when  Verstappen had a slow pit stop and then Mercedes responded by pitting Hamilton and having a slow stop themselves. This put the two drivers in the same part of the race track and Verstappen and Hamilton had a collison which ended up with the rear tire of the Red Bull making contact with Hamilton's head. After the incident Verstappen walked away extremely angry, and made some very silly statements on social media. Hamitlon also walked away and made sure to thank the FIA for mandating the Halo in 2018. If the Halo were not on the cars there would have been several fatal accidents in Formula 1 over the course of the last 4 years. 

This colliisn was deemed to be mostly the fault of Verstappen who has recieved a 3 place grid penalty for his next race. Red Bull is likely to also take the engine penalty at this time. The stewards said they did not take the result of the accident into consdieration when determing the severity of the penalty and I believe that is the right thing to do in all cases. 

The severity of the accident was caused by two things. The first being the Verstappen like Senna in the past says if you don't give me space we will have a collision, and he never leaves his rivals space. While it is tragic that Aryton Senna was killed in a F1 race it must be stated that there were several times where he could have killed one of his rivals. 

The second thing that caused the accident to be so severe was the sausage kerb. The kerb launched the Red Bull into the air. Had the kerb not been there the incident would have still led to botg drivers being out of the race, but one car would not have landed on top of another. 

Racing drivers taking racecars to the head has been a theme of the last 20 months, starting with Corey Lajoie in the 2020 Daytona 500 driving directly into the A post of Ryan Newman's flipping car. At Talladega earlier this year Joey Lagano was a few inches from having the same thing happen to him, And yesterday Hmilton ended up with Verstappen's wheel on his head. 

This is an issue that all of motorsport needs to work on. Eventually it is going to get someone killed. Sadly in motorsports safety often is not improved until someone is killed. There are certainly ways to keep cars from going airborne, especially considering downforce is also know as anti lift.