Monday, October 31, 2016

FIA inconsistency and waivering race stewards are what ruined the Mexico GP this weekend.

If you watched the Mexico F1 race this weekend, you'll have seen how the FIA and the race stewards totally destroyed the race. On the opening lap, Hamilton went off-track in the first corner and gained an advantage in doing so. Rosberg did the same on the second corner. The stewards investigated Hamilton, and decided no further action was needed, and didn't even look at Rosberg.
Skip to the closing laps of the race where Verstappen was defending against an attacking Vettel, and he went wide on the same corner, performing the exact same maneuver and even driving pretty much the same line as Hamilton, and as soon as the race was over, the stewards handed him a 5 second penalty.
This dropped Verstappen from third place to fifth.
Then we come to Vettel who was so infuriated by the fact that no action was taken during the race, that he got on the pit radio, cursed out his pit crew and Ferrari management and culminated in telling Charlie Whiting (the race director) to "F*ck Off". Once again, the stewards could have put a stop to that right then and there, but instead they waited until after the podium ceremony to hand down a 10 second penalty to Vettel (actually for changing line during braking). This pushed him down to fifth and pushed Verstappen back up to fourth in the final results.
This was a total farce. The whole point of race stewards and their guest drivers at the weekends, is to make a decision there and then. By dragging it out to the end of the race, and by being inconsistent with their penalties and choices, entire races are destroyed.
Think about it - if they let Rosberg and Hamilton go and let Verstappen go, the race would have ended exactly the way it did.
But if they handed down 5 second penalties to all three, and a ten second penalty to Vettel - doing it right there during the race whilst the teams could do something about it with strategy changes - the end result would have been very different.
The FIA need to exercise some consistency in their decisions. Verstappen was robbed of a third place yesterday because of corporate idiocy and procrastinating race stewards.