Formula 1 Round 22 Abu Dhabi GP

Hamilton binned it in Imola and was a lap down but because his team mate is so useless and was fighting with a Williams and they crashed Hamilton was able to limp back to the pits, repair the damage, change tyres and unlap himself under red flag conditions and finish 2nd.

Hamilton at Silverstone put Max in the wall, got a free tyre change and damage repaired under a red flag he caused and won the race.

So that's 43 points in his favour. Today wouldn't matter if the rules as you say were changed

True. Professional virtue signaller.

Safety cars are an element of almost every race, teams build strategies around it.

Last week RB gambled by leaving Max out there’d be another stop and lost, Mercedes lost on their strategy this week.

If Mercedes had nailed the strategy, with the car they have, losing the lead they had wouldn’t have mattered so much.

If Masi wanted to follow the rules then the race ends under safety car.

If he wanted it to end under racing conditions, then he says that the cars won't be unlapped and restarts the race.

Either way would have been acceptable. What is unacceptable is the hodge podge bollocking he decided to actually go with.

It's nothing remotely like that. Hamilton taking out Verstappen in Silverstone then winning anyway because the penalty was inadequate was like that. Mercedes taking a penalty for putting a new engine in the car in Brazil then winning anyway because the benefit of the engine was greater than the cost of the penalty was like that.

The closest football analogy to this would probably be a freak deflection leaving someone with an unexpected chance on goal which they score, it's just something that happens in sport. Safety cars happen and allow the field to close up, that's how motorsport works. Nobody at Red Bull did anything wrong, they made the absolute most of the circumstances, made the correct strategy call and pulled off a great overtaking move in the single lap they had to do it.

Ok if he is only doing for the optics on the podium then I understand. I thought you were just against him wearing a mask

To all the people moaning and complaining. The championship wasn't won on the last lap of the Abu Dhabi GP. It was won at Monaco, Zandvoort, Austin, Mexico, Imola and numerous other races.

It was nearly lost through absolutely no fault of his own at Baku at Silverstone and at Hungary, but Red Bull got the rub of the green for once today and made the absolute most of their opportunity so ultimately it wasn't lost.

Verstappen has led more laps this year than the entire rest of the grid combined, he's broken the all time record for number of podiums in a season and, aside from one tyre blowout and being hit by Mercedes three times, he's finished every single other race in the top 2, winning more than half of them.

To say the championship should be somehow taken off him because Michael Masi didn't tell a couple of backmarkers to overtake the safety car quickly enough is absolutely beyond comical.

I think as it’s clear that they wanted to finish the race with actual racing, it probably would have been more straightforward to start racing again without any of the back markers unlapping themselves.

Ultimately though, would it have made a difference? While it would mean Max would have had to clear them, he probably would have had 2 full laps then instead. I can’t really see any way that changes the result. And I think if that had happened people would still complain and think the race should’ve been red flagged anyway.