Formula 1 Round 22 Abu Dhabi GP

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.

Yeah I'd have to agree with that. Have a lot more respect for him tonight than his team (as if either care!!).

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.

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)

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.

2 Alpines no?

Yup... underwhelming allright....

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.

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.

that happened before with benneton.........they were found out though.

He was complaining about that too completely ignoring how he lucked out at Imola and Silverstone

So did Masi make Latifi crash too?