Formula 1 Round 22 Abu Dhabi GP

Of course it is. Had Hamilton decided to go on fresh tires earlier the safety car is largely irrelevant. He chose not to do that to stay away from Max.

Safety cars are known entities that strategies are built around. It doesn’t automatically hand the race to the driver behind you.

If you want to have races without any strategy or incident at all then why don’t we just have teams do a few practice laps and then AWS can tell us who the race winner will be.

They used to do that, but people found aggregate racing too confusing... See Suzuka 1994 for an an example.

Eh its actually what happened. Your making a judgement on 6 laps of Race 22. If your logic applied, Max carries a 12 point lead into Sundays race. So that last lap under green is irrelevant

No I don't. Safety cars are part of the sport. What exactly was a farce, that the race director got the race back underway?

The decision to only clear the cars between max and Lewis wasn't about getting the green flag. That decision was very unusual and it was all about the drama.

I'm happy with the outcome as I was supporting Max, but I think you need to acknowledge that the decision to only clear the cars between max and Lewis was all about showbiz. If it was all about getting the race underway and finishing under green flag, then not clearing any cars would have been simpler and faster.

It was a combination of serendipitous crash and the need for safety car, manufactured drama AND racing. I don't think it was about "anything bar the racing itself".

There are rules and procedures. It turns out the race director can override the rules if they want to. I certainly didn't know that and I think most others didn't know that either. It almost never comes up. But it came up in this instance and it resulted in the most dramatic finish to the season finale in decades

Overall it's Toto's fault. He could have told bottas at the restart to park the car in the middle of the track. Safety car cannot end, Lewis is champion. Multi 21 ...

What if Bottas was to stop the car cause of a crippling migraine and he couldnt go on?

Surely there’s nothing that could be done in that case

It's perfectly normal for lapped cars to be let past (in fact it would be completely unprecedented if they weren't)

It's perfectly normal for the safety car to be called in once the track is clear.

Everybody fully expected these two things to happen once the crash occurred, this is why Red Bull pitted immediately and Hamilton was so distraught on the radio.

The only abnormal thing was the strange delay in letting the lapped cars past.

Latifi crashed on lap 53. The car was clear on lap 55 and on lap 56 the last of the marshalls who were clearing up some off track debris returned behind the barriers. Lapped cars don't immediately get up to racing speed when they are let past the safety car, they are told to maintain an appropriate speed. It is safe for them to be allowed past once the blockage is clear, even if there are some marshalls cleaning up the last of the debris, as this would be treated like a VSC. This is why on lap 55 Lewis Hamilton's race engineer got on the radio and told him the lapped cars are about to be let past, as he was expecting normal procedure to be followed. This is why Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso, two experienced world champions with no affiliation to either Mercedes or Red Bull, both got on the radio to their teams asking why lapped cars weren't being allowed past like they normally are.

When the FIA announced out of the blue that they were taking the unprecedented step of not allowing lapped cars to pass Alonso (who was one of the lapped cars and is entirely unaffiliated to the two teams fighting for the title) literally laughed upon hearing the announcement and said they're keeping Max behind him when he should be in front of him.

Who knows what the reason was for that initial plan to go against all precedent and not allow lapped cars to pass. It was safe when the car was clear on lap 55 and multiple drivers were on the radio wondering why it wasn't happening, then it was even more safe on lap 56 when the marshalls had all left the run off area entirely. However, they didn't do this, until they eventually changed their minds and decided to apply the normal rules on lap 57 and let the lapped cars through. This meant that they had to compress things somewhat and have less of a gap between letting the lapped cars through and pulling the safety car in than they normally would, but this ultimately had zero impact on the outcome.

Not allowing the lapped cars past would have gone against all precedent. Not finishing the race under green flags when it's a 58 lap race and the blockage is completely clear on lap 56 would have gone against basic common sense in addition to going against the regulations that state that the race will be started when the clerk of the course deems the track safe. It would also have gone against a previous agreement among all teams that ending under a green flag should always be the priority call if it is safe to do so.

The only minor hiccup was the delay in letting the lapped cars through, but if they'd been allowed through a lap earlier when they should have been it would have had zero impact. A lot of the controversy on Sky was really just manufactured because their man lost. Safety cars are a part of F1. When a car crashes and stops on the racing line you absolutely expect a safety car, you expect the backmarkers to be cleared like normal, and you expect a return to racing if the incident is entirely clear two laps before the end of the race. Red Bull expected all of this, made the correct tactical choices, and Max executed perfectly with a superb overtake when the race restarted. It's as simple as that.

Max got lucky that Latifi crashed when he did certainly. It gave him an opportunity to gain 7 points (but only if he and the team executed on it perfectly, which they did). Lewis has gained more points than that from previous similar situations this season and if you managed to come up with some system that eliminated all possible advantages or disadvantages from safety cars and red flags and found a way to retroactively apply it across the whole season, Max would still be champion.

There are rules and they were followed. The race director used his discretion to get the last lap under green flag, something which all teams agreed beforehand would be preferable.

The race director wouldn't have such a decision to make if Latifi didn't bin it