F1 2021 – spoilers here

🙂

brilliant

Some folk are forgetting the purpose of professional sport, which is to get the sponsor’s logo in front of as many people as possible and keep it there.

I think they’ve done an excellent job. Even the folk who are outraged keep saying either Red Bull or Mercedes.

Pity Bernd didn’t “get confused” and stay out because he was waiting for all the lapped cars to go past him first. Like he’s done every other time for the last 20/21 years.

Tweets by MichaelMasiF1

Pie in the sky obviously, but imagine if Max reflects on this between now and the awards ceremony, and gets up on the stage and refuses to accept the WDC under these circumstances, then Lewis does the same, they shake hands and walk off. Balls in your court FIA 😀

That would shake things up a bit.

So, having read the relevant articles in the regs, I cannot for the life of me see anything in there that states, implies, or even leaves room for interpretation that 48.13 overrides 48.12. The latter permits the clerk of the course to leave the SC out longer than the lap after the last lapped car passes the leader, but makes no provision for bringing it in sooner.

Nor does it make any sense whatsoever to interpret “any cars” in 48.12 as anything other than “all cars”.

As far as I can see the FIA look like an absolute shambles. It’s a bit like going back to the time when they were widely perceived as batting for Ferrari.

Agreed Bez.

Max deserves the championship. He’s had more wins, more poles and finished 1st or 2nd in all bar three races. Baku with a tyre failure whilst he was leading, Hungary taken out by Bottas and silverstone fighting for the lead and taken out by Hamilton.
It’s the first championship Hamilton has actually had to fight for since he was beaten in 2016 and he’s now lost to a better driver who was arguably in the slower car.

Max deserves the championship for sure. Many would be of the opinion that both he and Lewis would have deserved it had either won. The audience deserves better from the sport. And Masi deserves a P45.

PS you forgot Max’s DNF for parking on Lewis’s head 😉

‘…was beaten in 2016 and he’s now lost to a better driver who was arguably in the slower car”

I am pretty sure the red bull chief mechanic said in an interview today that he thought that on balance the RB was the slightly faster car over the season. But I may have misheard.

PS you forgot Max’s DNF for parking on Lewis’s head 😉

And half points at Spa.

And half points at Spa.

Max finished first, so that would be included in the “finished first and second in all but [four] races”.

So this ends up in CAS. They nullify the result. That takes us back to the end of the last race, Verstappen wins WDC, Merc wins Constructors. Masi goes as a consequence, and off we go 2022. Right?

Right?

Carlos wins!? :hehe:

So this ends up in CAS. They nullify the result. That takes us back to the end of the last race, Verstappen wins WDC, Merc wins Constructors. Masi goes as a consequence, and off we go 2022. Right?

I think this is something Merc need to make clear – “we don’t want to change the result of the WDC, we want to ensure that this kind of farce can never happen again”

The only remotely similar situation I can think of is when Schumacher took his penalty on the last lap by not driving over the line but stopping in his box then going round again, exploiting a gap in the rules. For that they took the result from the previous lap, added the equivalent time penalty on the Schumacher’s time and called it at that.

So for this one they should count back a lap to when the Safety Car pulled in and that should be the result, the same as if the procedures had been followed. The downside to that is that Red Bull will claim they have been robbed of a title for Max and Hamilton won’t sit easy knowing that he broke the record due to a post-race change. The FIA and Massi have completely screwed this up no matter what happens. If the results don’t change then it undermines Max’s first championship, if the results do change then it reawakens the whole issue of stewards and courtrooms deciding the result, not racing.

I don’t particularly like the idea of Max being champion this year but if he won that race fairly then I’d accept it, to win it under these circumstances I’m really not happy but it’s not the fault of the drivers or teams, they played with what they were dealt. The fault lies squarely with Massi and the FIA for not only getting it wrong today but also all of the previous contentious decisions over the season. They need to sort this all out legally very fast as the longer it goes on the more damage it does to the sport.

Thing is burner,

At the end of last season, when asked to comment on Hamilton’s 7th win Norris said he didn’t think anything about it because like you, he thought it was all about the car.

I’m sure Russell thought the same when got the drive with Lewis off with covid.

I think that this season, both of them have had their eyes opened to just how good Hamilton actually is. Some people are still blind to it though.

Whatever, this will always be remembered as a stolen championship and the moral victory Lewis’s. I think that’s what probably hurts some people the most. Whenever Schumacher and Lewis’s seven victories are compared, the number seven and a half will come into the conversation at some point.

I’m a Lewis fan and I’m not even angry.

I’m not sure it’s worth committing to watching a whole season of racing, when the final outcome is decided arbitrarily.

Interesting conspiracy on Kravitz’ notebook, redbull deliberately underfueled Perez so he would be that bit quicker if he had to hold up Hamilton, so he wouldn’t just breeze past. Would explain why Perez was so confused as to why they retired him…

I can’t believe they would under-fuel him, what if you needed him to be fast at the end?

I assume they planned to let him go longer on his tires, hoping he’d leapfrog Hamilton in the first round of stops, as he did.

RB will have conceded they probably weren’t going to win the WCC, so SP was probably expendable, and be of more benefit there, than at the end.

Here’s the thing. If Masi’s primary concern was making sure the race wasn’t completed under a safety car, why wasn’t the race red flagged?

I think it’s mildly amusing that the people on here sneering earlier at Horner for whinging “it’s not fair” are the very ones throwing their teddies the furthest out of the pram.

Reluctantjumper

So for this one they should….

Except in your Schumacher example that was a team finding a gap in the rules to try and win. Whereas today Red Bull didn’t doing anything even slightly wrong (or close to the limit) and the mess was entirely by the FIAs own hand

I think it’s mildly amusing that the people on here sneering earlier at Horner for whinging “it’s not fair” are the very ones throwing their teddies the furthest out of the pram.

Horner didn’t do anything wrong.

Except in your Schumacher example that was a team finding a gap in the rules to try and win. Whereas today Red Bull didn’t doing anything even slightly wrong (or close to the limit) and the mess was entirely by the FIAs own hand

That’s why I started with:

The only remotely similar situation I can think of…

The current scenario is so far removed from anything that’s happened before it’s unfathomable. Another one that might come close us Fisichella’s win in Brazil that was originally attributed to Raikonnen, that result was reversed at the next race but then the stakes there were far lower than today.

Paddy Power are paying out on both Max and Lewis wins.
Do gambling companies often do that?
Not a gambler myself and certainly wouldn’t put money on f1.

I think it’s mildly amusing that the people on here sneering earlier at Horner for whinging “it’s not fair” are the very ones throwing their teddies the furthest out of the pram.

We’ve had a fairly controversial season with neither side being blameless, for example I think LH was mostly at fault at Silverstone, MV mostly at fault at Monza. MV played dirty in Brazil and the stewards let him get away with it, FWIW I think LH should have given the place back on lap 1 here.
More to the point we had some decent racing here, both teams playing almost nicely (Checo properly hard but not overstepping it, big kudos to him) but then the FIA appear right at the end and make a right royal ****up of the whole thing, neither team to blame there but Massi’s head has to roll. We have to have rules applied consistently and to the letter, no ifs no buts, no whinging by or negotiations with any team, the RD should be saying this is what the rules say and that is what’s going to happen, end of. They should not, under any circumstances, be making up rules on the hoof.
LH was robbed today but not by MV, we can’t begrudge him his win.

Agreed

So, hypothetically, if Lewis had had to give the place back on lap 1, and assuming the rest of the race played out identically, Mercedes would be the ones with the opportunity for two free pits stops…

Also…I wonder how Lewis now feels about how good a team mate Bottas has been. VB was nowhere today when he should have been within a few seconds of Max to scupper any Red Bull pit stop plans,

Lets hope GR proves to be a worthy team mate!

So, having read the relevant articles in the regs, I cannot for the life of me see anything in there that states, implies, or even leaves room for interpretation that 48.13 overrides 48.12. The latter permits the clerk of the course to leave the SC out longer than the lap after the last lapped car passes the leader, but makes no provision for bringing it in sooner.

Nor does it make any sense whatsoever to interpret “any cars” in 48.12 as anything other than “all cars”.

The protest decision explains this though – 48.13 states that the safety car goes in at the end of *this current* lap and the decision can’t be changed, so over rules 48.12 that says about the following lap. 48.12 also says it only applies after the message “all lapped cars to overtake” is issued (which it wasn’t).

I can’t see anything in the rules which says that they can’t decide to get lapped cars out of the way to save them from interfering in the race result. It was pretty much clear that none of the other drivers wanted to get in the way of the championship fight.

At the end of the day, Max still had to pass Lewis who left the door wide open and could’ve made it far more difficult. It was still a fight for most of the lap. Red bull threw the dice, took chances and came up double six. Sometimes happens in F1.

Fairest result would be to do it as a lap before, but to ask Lewis to drop behind Max to make up for the dodgy overtake on lap 1, or give a 5s penalty. Surely couldn’t be any complaints 😂 But I think the stewards got it spot on.

PS – completely not on for Toto to be calling for the safety car to not be deployed.
PPS – I see George Russell has already turned into a Merc lapdog…

I’m doubtful it’ll get overturned, and not sure it should either – because then you have to go back through every dodgy decision all season and look at a hundred what ifs, but I do think it’s important that Mercedes challenge it as much as they can so the FIA are forced into doing something. This whole season has been marred by Masi’s weakness under pressure, too many times to count and both for and against various teams. Culminating in yesterdays shambles. I’m glad that in the end the most controversial incident is not really Mercedes vs Red Bull, in so far as neither Max or Horner or Lewis or Toto are culpable for it. Masi must go and lots of regs need massively clarifying if not changing. Maybe it’ll take Mercedes pushing this protest to do that?

Here’s the thing. If Masi’s primary concern was making sure the race wasn’t completed under a safety car, why wasn’t the race red flagged?

He didn’t think that far ahead and it wasn’t until Karen Horner got on the radio that he realised ‘The Show’ was going to suffer, hence the snap decisions and changes in quick succession. So when people say:

Horner didn’t do anything wrong.

while he was within the rules to moan at Massi his actions most probably triggered the series of events that quickly made the whole weekend a pointless farce. But then F1 is headline news this morning so, as Bernie was happy to do regularly, dragging the sport through the gutter into the off-season is considered good for keeping the sport in the public mind.

I wonder if this will trigger any significant changes. Petrol is on the way out. One or two big teams or big drivers moving to formula E could be the death F1. Lewis has been talking about green issues, maybe this will make him actually do something. If I was boss of Formula E I’d be shouting about how my sport was “cleaner” 😉

The whining to the RD definitely needs to stop, I can understand Toto’s dismay on the last lap, but the earlier one about the SC was not on.

I wonder if this will trigger any significant changes. Petrol is on the way out.

F1 is already moving to a “sustainable fuel” thought TBH I’ve not explored the detail of that. FE is fine as a proving ground for electric drivetrain technology but until teams are designing and building their own cars it’s a long long way from F1 as an engineering challenge.

Anyhow changes I’d like to see, most of which are covered above :

– A new race director
– A clear set of regulations, down to the detail of how to determine who has what rights in a corner
– One way comms from RD to teams, perhaps with a simple channel for teams to ask for incidents to be looked at, eg a template – Please review incident between cars X, Y and Z at/after/before turn N on lap A
– An apology from the FIA that they screwed up the biggest F1 race for years

FWIW FIA election is in a few days time and there will be a new president. That gives them the perfect opportunity to say “Our top category of motorsport is tarnished, let’s fix it”.

No pitstops under safety car would have stopped yesterday being a farce.

No pitstops under safety car would have stopped yesterday being a farce.

That’s always been pushed back on safety grounds eg if there has been a tyre failure and others are out on similar age tyres, or if someone has run over a load of carbon fibre debris after a crash. There could be an alternative – no stops until cars are formed up behind SC, then one lap where all teams may pit but rejoin in the same order as they were.

I do think it’s important that Mercedes challenge it as much as they can so the FIA are forced into doing something.

Yep, I completely agree. I think they need to take a look at the racing regulations in detail and update them to remove as much ambiguity as possible. Is there any reason for actually having a safety car anyway? Why not just red flag it and give the teams a choice of not making any changes to the car and restarting with track position or working on the car and being shuffled to the back for the restart? It’s not like driving around behind the safety car is interesting at all and the races have a time limit anyway, so just ticking off laps to say that the race has been completed doesn’t really achieve anything.