Championship showdown this weekend. Will Lewis win his eight title or will Max win his first? All will be revealed on Sunday.
TV Times:
Qualifying Live: 1PM. (Sky Sports)
Race Live: 1PM. (Sky Sports and Channel 4)
Bring! It! On!
I don't know there, I'm no fan of Lewis's but he went up a few notches in my estimation with the way he presented himself post race today. Not easy for him to congratulate Max under the circumstances but he did without question. That has to be commended whether a fan or not.
Now Toto, who I would have looked at as a very presentable team principal went well down in my estimation with his spoilt child outbursts to Michael Masi. It has definitely put him in a bad light.
Yeah I'd have to agree with that. Have a lot more respect for him tonight than his team (as if either care!!).
I was surprised and impressed by that, but it does ring a bit hollow when his team brought in the barristers and tried to steal it in the back rooms afterwards, something I doubt they decided to do without consulting him.
Very true, but it wasn't Lewis's decision to bring in the barristers. My actual first thought was that Lewis may even look to break free from Mercedes, he has questioned their decisions a lot over the season, sometimes rightly, sometimes not. Again, no Lewis fan here.
i dont think it would have made much diference. those cars were on blue flags and would have pulled out of the way asap down the straight. the 5 cars were
vettle former redbull driver and huge schumi fan who wants his record to stand
alonso who doesnt like lewis
2 alpha tauri s . sister cars to red bull
norris. only one to have any reason to hold up max. would he though who knows
I don't know a whole lot about F1 rules but as an outsider looking in the behaviour of Mercedes post-race is not a great look for the sport at a time when it should be basking in the huge publicity it's been receiving this week.
Surely you just need to take your medicine and admit you were beaten? I get there's high stakes and records at stake, but at this stage even if it's overturned it's not going to be the same as winning it on the track, is it?
As conscious of his image as Hamilton is, I suspect he wouldn't want to win it like this, handed to him after a legal battle. Right or wrong would have little to do with it, it just wouldn't be a good look.
Well the finish to this season has been a shot in the arm for something that has been a relative bore-fest for the last 20 years except for a couple of seasons.
No harm that the self-entitled whinging little sh1t Hamilton came out the wrong end of it either.
Actually I thought he was complaining about them stopping the race and thus RB getting a free pitstop.
Last 20 seasons is a bit harsh - we had consistently great and closely fought championships from 2005 to 2012 before the 2014 hybrid rules were brought in to ruin everything (and 2013 was a bore mainly because all the teams shifted focus to the 2014 cars)
Kinda agree. There was too much interference to say it wasn't manipulated a little. Then to do it on the last few laps as well. That's a lot of coincidence.
I presume they brought a barrister as they, quite reasonably on previous form, expected Masi to make a total balls of it.
Anyway now they need to take it all the way to the courts and then offer to magnanimously drop it to avoid further embarrassing exposure of the FIA’s utter incompetence if the FIA meets certain conditions and No 1 needs to be Masi’s P45.
Martin Brundle asks who would you put in instead, frankly I’d give bozo the clown a run I doubt he’d be worse.
Kinda hard to nail a strategy when the FIA seem pulling the strings against you.
2 Alpines no?
Who'd want the job knowing team principals can try influence decisions on live audio, this should be curtailed in my opinion.
Yup... underwhelming allright....
I don't watch much F1 anymore. This clown show wouldn't encourage me back to it either.
The safety car was on the lap Latifi crashed. They didn't choose what lap he'd crash on.
If a single car is stopped on track where it can't quickly be recovered and there isn't a massive amount of debris or other reason to completely stop the race, you bring a safety car out. This is completely normal and it would be unprecedented to not do this.
Backmarkers are allowed to unlap themselves when there is a safety car. This is completely normal since the rule was introduced a few years and it would be unprecedented to not do this.
Once the accident is cleared, the safety car goes back in and the race resumes. This is also completely normal. Traditionally, when it is close to the end of the race, the race director always prioritises getting the race going again as soon as the incident is clear so that the race can finish under green flags, sometimes meaning they have to compress things a little bit and get racing again, in this case before all of the backmarkers were cleared. This isn't completely out of the ordinary and the rules are clear about the race director having the authority to call in the safety car whenever they deem it safe, regardless of where the backmarkers happen to be.
Nothing untoward happened behind the safety car, Red Bull were lucky but it's a standard part of F1 and they made the most of it. Mercedes could have changed tyres but chose not to and to focus their efforts on trying to lobby the race director not to let the race restart instead - they've had much success lobbying the race director previously, who even asked Verstappen to give up a position at the last race despite admitting he hadn't even looked at the incident - but in this case normal procedures were followed rather than succumbing to Toto's pressure. The only thing that the FIA did wrong was the terrible communication.
Just watched the restart, would it have been different if Sainz had been directly behind Verstappen instead of Riccardo? Sainz was stuck behind 2 lapped cars, maybe things wouldn't have been different but again something we will never know because of that flawed restart
You’re right that we’ll never know. However, judging by the deltas from the last lap the FIA determined that in a utopian world that Max would have won.
This data was available to them and was part of their explanation and reasoning for dropping the appeal. You can see proof of it in the letter published by Merc on their official Twitter after the meeting.
Controversial? Yes. More controversial than the Schumacher/Hill collision? No. These people saying that this kind of controversy will stop them from tuning in to future races haven’t been following very long it seems.
No he wouldn't have, the Delta's of the last lap would have consisted of RB on fresh soft tyes and MB on old hard tyres. MB were all over RB on same(ish) age tyres, without the shennanigans of that restart RB hadn't a chance, and also denying Sainz a shot at 1st or 2nd by having him restart behind 2 cars.
that happened before with benneton.........they were found out though.
To the lighter side. Austrian commentators on the last lap. Pointing out that the moderator mentioned use of drs three times and get corrected twice. In case you wonder if crofty saying nonsense is normal
He was complaining about that too completely ignoring how he lucked out at Imola and Silverstone
Mercedes did pick a good strategy though. If the normal safety car procedure was ran then they would have won. The original decision was to keep the backmarkers in place and restart. Mercedes didn't argue with this either. Masi basically put Max on Hamilton's tail pipe knowing he had a huge advantage even though Max had already gained massively under the safety car.
So did Masi make Latifi crash too?
🙄
Many would argue that the FAI were pulling strings against Max for much of the season, including at the start of the race.
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://w7.vanillicon.com/v2/75771797d68b15f0c5c6e631c7bb7ced.svg)
