There is only so much one can do when the F1 balloon goes up. Five and a half hours after the chequered flag fell. We did not get the official race result until 00.05. But perhaps not.Īnyway, the subsequent mess and the celebrations, mixed with Mercedes’s pain and sense of outrage, combined to create a bittersweet evening, with work delayed and plans blown apart. NASCAR has some complicated rules which can extend races when there is a late caution. And he did that for the fans and for the good of the sport. Masi’s only fault, if you call it that, was to try to make sure there was a race at the end. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, but it was the way the rules are.Īre there better ways? Perhaps, and I hope that the FIA will spend some time looking at the Safety Car rules and asking whether this is the right way to run things. Losing with grace is better than losing with lawyers. It was the sporting gods having their say. Toto and his cohorts reacted as one would expect them to react, but is appealing the various decisions going to help F1? No, probably not. Lewis took his defeat with grace and style.
I never want to hear Max complain again that the FIA has got it in for him, and I want Christian Horner to learn a lot about stewarding when he attends the FIA Stewards event later this winter. He used the powers he has to do what he felt was best was the World Championship. Live sport has a habit of creating such insane situations and referees have to deal with them. It wasn’t fair perhaps, but it was within the rules. But with Max on new tyres and Lewis on old tyres this effectively gave Max a chance to snatch the title. The ones between Lewis and Max would get in the way of the title fight. Masi’s instruction was logical in that the cars behind Max were irrelevant and there was no time to clear them all. Before that we heard Max explaining that it was typical of the FIA to leave the lapped cars in place to screw him (he and Red Bull both have a persecution complex in this respect). Then Masi gave the instruction that only the cars between Hamilton and Verstappen should unlap themselves. That was normal because there was still clean-up work going on and the safety of the track workers was still a question. An initial message from Race Control said that the lapped cars should remain in place. And what a damp squib that would have been, with Lewis and Max driving around the last lap, unable to fight. In that case, Hamilton was screwed, except that there were not enough laps to do that. Normally the lapped cars would be allowed to pass the Safety Car when the wreckage was cleaned up and then the race could start again. That put him behind some backmarkers in the queue behind the Safety Car. But Red Bull stopped Max, put him on soft tyres and sent him out again. Logically the race was going to end under caution, so Lewis was safe. To have come in and get new tyres would perhaps have led Red Bull to leave Verstappen out and that would have given him track position that could have handed him victory at the restart. Hamilton was not far from the pitlane entrance and so the strategists had to make a quick call. This was the Mercedes nightmare because Lewis Hamilton’s lead was effectively wiped out, which was unfair, but the way the rules are. There was a lot of debris on the track, more than one could deal with using a Virtual Safety Car, but not really enough for a Red Flag.
It’s like being an F1 spark plug…Īfter Nicholas Latifi crashed (and those who blame the Canadian for causing this really do need to have their heads examined by professional medical staff) there was a problem. You only get mentioned when things go wrong. You don’t ever get praise when things go right. That’s the problem with being a race director. Social media has become a battleground between supporters of one side or the other and everyone is throwing things at Michael Masi, a man who had to make difficult decisions, which turned out to be controversial. The ragondin (coypu) swimming in the pond and the silly scuttling moorhens remind one that outside the world of F1 rivers still flow to the sea and the seasons still change, despite what happened in Yas Marina. But one needs perspective in these matters and sitting at home, watching the activity on the marsh which my home overlooks, provides a good opportunity to think clearly about things. These last days have been tumultuous times for Formula 1, with the extraordinary World Championship showdown in Abu Dhabi.