Martin Brundle calls for F1 to make urgent rule change after incident at Italian GP

Martin Brundle has called on Formula 1 authorities to make an urgent rule change after an incident at the Italian Grand Prix race start.

Ferrari's Charles Leclerc took an emotional victory at Monza in front of the Tifosi, finishing ahead of the McLaren pair of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.

Piastri had led the majority of the race after overtaking his team-mate, who started on pole, on lap one, but decided to attempt to make a two-stop strategy work by pitting on lap 38.

Leclerc and his Ferrari team-mate, Carlos Sainz, however, decided to attempt to stretch their first set of hard tyres to the end.

And while Sainz was overtaken by both McLarens, Leclerc held on at the front to secure a famous victory.

But the beginning of the race was almost overshadowed by an incident prior to the start procedure.

As Norris and Piastri lined up on the front row, it quickly became clear that the backmarker cars were a considerable distance away from the starting grid.

By the time the 20th-placed driver, Zhou Guanyu, had lined up on the grid, over 30 seconds had passed.

And Brundle, who was on commentary for Sky Sports, was not happy about the long wait, given the rapid decrease in tyre temperatures for those at the front and therefore the increased risk of a tyre lock-up or crash at turn one.

He said: "It's too long, they need to talk to the drivers at the back about getting underway."

He described the current procedure as being potentially 'dangerous', and urged the matter to be brought up at the next drivers' meeting.

The race start is always preceded by a formation lap, with a maximum lap time potentially one way of solving the problem.

The FIA introduced a similar solution to issues surrounding qualifying, where drivers would be too slow on the outlap and therefore cause heavy amounts of traffic to build up around the final corners - creating danger for those already on flying laps.

That rule was introduced at the 2023 Singapore Grand Prix, with then race director Niels Wittich writing in his pre-race notes: "For the safe and orderly conduct of the event, other than in exceptional circumstances accepted as such by the stewards, any driver that exceeds the maximum time from the second Safety Car line to the first Safety Car line on ANY lap during and after the end of the qualifying session, including in-laps and out-laps, may be deemed to be going unnecessarily slowly."