[mayankk]

Originally Posted by narayans80

It was master strategist Ross Brawn that was instrumental in getting Lewis onboard.

You're wrong, you know that. As per above, it was something else. Incriminating photos, bank statements, evidence of treason against toto..... That's why he got there, and remained. Otherwise, toto wanted to put NK in that seat. He too would have got 7 championships.

The orange guy has, shockingly, more class than his fanboys!

[deepakr82]

This race was rigged. Its a shame it had to end in the manner it did. Max was nowhere close to winning that race. The end ruling by FIA and the stewards is going to be debated for a long long time. At first they decided that lapped cars cannot overtake and on Christian Horner questioning Masi as to why the lapped cars weren't allowed to pass, the Race director decides to allow only the 4 or 5 cars in between Lewis and Max to unlap themselves and decided to unleash Max on fresher tyres to race against Lewis on worn out rubber. Needless to say, several of the decisions made by the FIA director and the stewards have been inconsistent and controversial over the last few races. Michael Masi should step down. The best man didn't win the race or the championship in 2021.

[Dippy]

Phew, this must be the longest F1 thread on the forum in recent times. That just shows the impact of the season finale of 2021.

As most know, I am and always will be a Ferrari fan. My loyalties will never change whether they win or lose. And I have always watched races in a neutral manner after Michael left the sport.

Coming to yesterday's race, yes there was a mess and the last lap controversy was questionable. But once the final lap was go, Max overtook Lewis on track very cleanly and in a very fair manner. He has been brilliant this year and that definitely disoriented Lewis to an extent even though he is a 7 time champ. There is no doubt that he has had it easy these past few years.

To say Max got lucky with the championship is plain silly. Lewis has infact also benefitted from steward's calls over the season and is no doubt a very lucky driver. Silverstone is just one example.

I still fail to understand why Lewis didn't give the place back to Max yesterday, nor did he reduce the gap. He would have taken Max later easily as his was the faster car by miles. Also Red Bull was perfect with strategies and used the VSC and SC period to their advantage perfectly while Mercedes was as risk of losing track position. I still feel Lewis could have have caught up on fresh tyres after pitting.

It was good to see Lewis gracious in defeat after the race but that hasnt always been the case. He always cries when he's not winning or things are not going his way. Checo "defended like a lion" outstanding driving by him and in no way dangerous as Lewis was grumbling on the radio. Also Toto asking for no safety car was in poor taste.

No one is a saint in F1. Senna has had his episodes and so has Michael. The fire to win is always more than anything else and I see the same in Max. He totally deserved the title this year.

Mercedes appealing and now talks of going to court just shows how shocked they are that they could be defeated. They have won the constructors again and that is a huge achievement. They should just celebrate that and move on.

Yes it was a screw up by Masi and his gang but its all now done and dusted. Max is World Champion and its nice to see a new name at the top. Hoping 2022 will be a cracker with the new rules and new cars. Lewis wont have it easy with Russel as his team mate and Im sure there will be fireworks. Looking forward to more drivers battling for wins and the championship next year and Ferrari making a comeback.

And yes Im happy Michael's record stays equalled and not broken yet.

[fast_n_curious]

The F1 2021 season was one of the most competitive that I could remember. Two drivers showing driving skills which was way ahead of their team mates.
IMHO, Verstappen deserved to win, Red Bull took all the risk that they could and their team work was evident. Mercedes lacked the team work.
Perez jumping Lando in the first lap itself was the biggest turning point.
Verstappen aptly pointed out "Checo Is Legend". Bottas was no where in the race, I guess Bottas had signed out of Mercedes once his seat was given to Russel for 2022 season.
But lets not anything away from Verstappen, he was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of Mercedes mistakes (or any slippage). As a neutral fan it was a delight watching and re-watching the race.
Driver who just could not deliver was Ricardo, Ricardo is a great driver but this season he just could not come in terms with the McLaren. I hope 2022 will be different for him.
With every season we have few drivers who stood out and this season Russel from Williams, Gasly from Toro Rosso, Alonso from Alpine (we can include Perez also) were my drivers who delivered far more than they car they had.
With new regulations coming in for 2022 F1 season I am eagerly waiting for what it brings to the tarmac. 97 days for the first race.

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[Ik.Singh]

A very highly controversial race. Lewis got a great start no doubt. But how he overtook from outside the track in turn 9 was not right in my opinion. Then Michael Masi made somewhat of a weird statement saying Lewis slowed down sufficiently well.
But after that, what a dominant performance by Lewis!
Max was just not having the pace yesterday.

Although what the stewards did during the safety car is an extremely debatable topic, but I am still wondering why did they not red flag the race in the first place. With only 4-5 laps to go the incident happened. If they would have red flagged we would have got 2-3 racing laps atleast.

Although Max was the less deserving one basis of the last race, but if we look on his performance throughout the season, I think he very well deserved that championship. I have nothing against Lewis, he is a world class racer. But this year, Max was the better driver in my opinion.

Congratulations to Max and i wish best of luck to Lewis for next year.

[iamahunter]

I am of the opinion that races should be won on the track and not in the courtroom.

But, like mercedes has gone to the court(simply adding to show how bad of loser Sir.crybaby is!) then all the incidences/penalties and decisions taken over the season should be considered and fairly judged.
Over the season, many decisions were in favour of Mercedes, more infact.

[anb]

Originally Posted by iamahunter

I am of the opinion that races should be won on the track and not in the courtroom.

Restart with no lapped cars between P1 & P2 and some lapped cars between P2 and P3 was never seen in the history of automotive racing. No racing is needed between P2 and P3 on track? I still wonder how people can justify such a decisions. Questions should be asked against such decisions.

[Vid6639]

Originally Posted by navin

Even Masi didn't know, he changed his mind. Why?

Did you not hear the radio message from Masi? He said his first priority is to clear the track and get the race started. He will come back on what to do with back markers later. Which is what they did....

From Mercedes point of view, for Max to win:

1. They had to finish under green
2. All unlapped cars would be permitted to un-lap themselves (aka get out of the way)

Both were unlikely events, but both happened.

From Red Bull point of view for Max to win

1. They needed him on fresh tyres so that in the chance that they finish under green Max had a chance at fighting with Lewis.
2. Mercedes should not pit Lewis and put on fresh tyres.

Guess what happened? Mercedes took the bait and lost.

The way I see it.

Assuming FIA/Masi had made it clear to all teams that once the safety car is out of the way, unlapped cars would be allowed to un-lap themselves, and understanding this Hamilton also came in to pit and switched to soft.

They cannot predict this because they do not know how long it takes for the crashed car to clear. It has been done this way always just that in this case it was close to end of the race and was championship decider.

The mistake was not allowing all cars to unlap. However this had no impact on the outcome of the race so the stewards did not do it.

Hamilton would be behind Max with both on fresh soft tyres.

Granted Hamilton had the better car, yet with this same "better" car and fresh hard rubber, he took a while to pass Perez who was on fading soft tyres. And Perez was even able to come back at Hamilton with those soft fading tyres.

LOL. Lewis has passed Max on track more than Max managing to get past.

Perez played a special role like Alonso did. Drove the car beyond what is possible to help the team mate.

For Hamilton to then pass Max, even with a better car but equal tyres, would have been a long shot. Perez may be "a beast" but Max (with everything he had to lose) would have thrown the car at Hamilton. And Hamilton would have just 1 lap to make his overtake and make it stick. That's not a lot of time.

Max was clearly told that if he tried anything dirty points would be deducted. He had more to lose if he was given a penalty by throwing the car at Lewis.

In the end, Lewis had the better car and was the quicker driver yesterday. Mercedes could have given a chance to Lewis and got him to pit to fight on track with the faster car and the better package.

But instead Lewis was literally the sitting duck with the oldest tyres.

I will say it was not Lewis fault yesterday and neither was it Race Control. It was merely a gamble that paid off for Red Bull but a similar gamble that Merc took which didn't pay off.

Bottas at the end on radio even told his race engineer, that they should have gotten Lewis in for tyres at the safety car.

That 1 lap fight would not have been one sided considering that even without DRS and older tyres Lewis was alongside Max and pushed him into a mistake and ran him wide. With fresh soft tyres that was a race that would go on till the flag.

Mercedes were too conservative yesterday. They even asked Lewis in the middle what tyres to put on if pitting. And then there was a VSC but they left him out again.

It was tricky. If Mercedes pitted Lewis first then Max would have gotten track position by not pitting and if race finished under SC then Max wins. If Merc pitted Lewis after Max then Lewis lost track position and if no SC then again Max wins. Red bull had more options to try than Mercedes who were having track position but higher risk.

This was like 2019 when Mercedes did another pit stop and passed Verstappen with 3 laps to spare but Red Bull thought track position was more important.

[iamahunter]

Originally Posted by anb

Restart with no lapped cars between P1 & P2 and some lapped cars between P2 and P3 was never seen in the history of automotive racing. No racing is needed between P2 and P3 on track? I still wonder how people can justify such a decisions. Questions should be asked against such decisions.

Why focus on just one decision, why not to consider the entire season? There were inconsistencies throughout the season mate
Oh, as many were in favour of Mercedes? Is it?

[anb]

Originally Posted by iamahunter

Why focus on just one decision, why not to consider the entire season? There were inconsistencies throughout the season mate
Oh, as many were in favour of Mercedes? Is it?

This is Formula 1, not a street racing. Why do separate rules for P3 another set of rules for P2? As you said in the previous post, races should be won on Track, and not by twisting the rules. Sainz had the opportunity to take a shot at winning the race , considering Hamilton and Verstappen will be concentrating only on each other . The lapped cars between P3 and P2, denied the opportunity for Sainz

[Chetan_Rao]

If someone said stewarding has been inconsistent through the year, I'd agree. If someone said it was biased for or against any one in particular, I'd laugh.

All teams, pretensions of cool heads and moral high horses notwithstanding, take a 'hard but fair if I do it, dangerous if you do it' approach to incidents, and a 'they're great when they rule in our favor, idiots when not' approach to stewarding.

The constant badgering of race control at every opportunity was evident throughout the season, and it's one of Michael Masi & FIA's biggest failures that the teams weren't told off the first time they tried it. I'm glad FOM started broadcasting those exchanges this year, shows how much interference race control and stewards have to deal with while trying to run a race and make decisions on the fly with little margin for error. That's not an excuse to do a poor job, they absolutely must do better, but they're far from being the only bad apples in the situation as they're being made out to be.

[rkv_2401]

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

That said, there's no ONE obvious decision that would make everything fair and whole now, so whether 'sporting integrity' can be restored by a court is arguable, irrespective of what they decide. FIA made a mess, and undoing it by stripping a driver & team of a title earned over a season, not just one contentious race or incident, isn't any fairer than their decisions costing the other driver and team a title they would've deservedly earned too.

Within F1, sporting fairness would be post-facto revising the 2008 WDC classification once Renault were caught race-fixing, but if that had led to the WDC changing hands, would that be fair to either Massa or Hamilton? Neither McLaren driver should've arguably been in contention for the 2007 WDC after the car was disqualified from the constructor's championship. If either had eventually won, which they both came perilously close to, would it be fair to their competitors?

There are plenty of examples in other sports where events and titles were decided on technicalities that flew in the face of sporting fairness. Look at cricket, South Africa 1992 and New Zealand 2019 come to mind.

The option to litigate specific situations is everyone's right, but it needs to be tempered by the possibility that it's a Pandora's Box capable of vast consequences beyond the immediate dispute. Once a precedent for off-track litigation is set, what happened yesterday will look like a schoolboy dispute compared to what will follow in the years to come.

Sporting integrity is not a black & white monolith, it sometimes involves drawing a line under a situation at some point even if you feel robbed, and moving on.

We'll see how this turns out, but it's naive to think 'sporting integrity' will be restored by litigating yesterday's events.


P.S. If I was the race director, I would've red-flagged the thing given the stakes, allowed lap cars through on the out lap, followed by a rolling restart for a 3-4 lap sprint with tire advantages neutralized. That would've been within the rules - even if unprecedented - and arguably fairer to everyone.

I didn't mean sporting integrity or fairness in the sense of results being returned, I meant sporting integrity in the sense of the authority-in-charge consistently following the rules (ideally in a way that treats everyone the same way) or at least not breaking their own rules and precedent to inculcate last-lap drama. As I mentioned, I don't want Verstappen to get impacted in any way, just the FIA to understand something isn't right and change something drastically for next season.

I try to be careful of accusing the authority even when they're in the wrong for exactly the reasons you've mentioned, every decision can be undermined, even litigated and once you open this box of off-track litigations you can arguably never go back. Race Direction have been infuriating all season long, but they've never made a blatant mistake that quite a few drivers from Alonso to Verstappen have called out but is STILL within the rules that MIGHT swing the championship in Lewis's favor, gone back on it to make an even bigger mistake that is not at all within the rules and can clearly be attributed to defining the direction in which the championship swings(defining the direction and not the final positions itself as Max did overtake on track - but if lapped cars did pass, the race would have ended under safety car at that point as the safety car would have passed one of the lines by the time Schumacher got through. And would this knowledge have tilted Mercedes to pit had they known lapped cars will be allowed to overtake initially?), and justified it in such a silly manner when none of this was necessary and all of it could have been avoided by either just following precedent or putting their foot down and saying 'Safety first'.

They had a 'race' in Spa, that was okay for safety reasons but ending this race under a safety car instead of rushing to get it out of the way isn't? I think the tipping point for me personally was how hopeless the justification was - I was holding out hope that there's something that I, a regular guy watching the race on Hotstar on my phone, would have missed that the professional race stewards with all their data would have caught. Some delay in patching up the barriers, a conflict between the 'clerk' and the Race Director, anything? But no. It's only saying (paraphrasing) 'any cars does not mean all and the outcome wouldn't have changed anyway' when in the Eifel GP 2020, he says quote - "There’s a requirement in the sporting regulations to wave all the lapped cars past." (https://www.motorsportweek.com/2020/...gp-safety-car/ - found this on Reddit, and from what I see the respective lines in the regulations are the same for 2020 and 2021 despite having different numbers.)

I had this epiphany after yesterday's debacle that Max and Lewis race the way they do because the rules let them. The season's been controversial because Race Direction lets the grey areas in the rules go unpunished. If he were risking a drive-through penalty or stop-go penalty for not handing back the place or dangerous driving respectively, would we have seen Max behave the way he did in Jeddah? If Lewis was risking a very strong penalty for causing a collision in Silverstone, would we have seen him drift away from the apex?

Anyway, seems like Mercedes are considering not going through with the appeal. Makes sense, because the only thing they can appeal for(to my very limited understanding) is that Lewis be crowned the WDC and the classification returned to lap 57's standing. Which as @Hayek mentioned, is terrible PR for them and probably not what Lewis or anyone involved want. Maybe they can band together and approach the FIA for greater clarity on the rules or something. There are many people calling for Masi to be fired, and while I wouldn't wish for anyone to lose their job, I really hope something changes in the future and that we people who watch the races for entertainment won't need to (or be able to) pick apart the central authority's decision making process so easily.

And also, congrats to Honda. From their abysmal McLaren days where they were being publicly insulted by Alonso, all those grid penalties(I think over the season it might have been 100+?) for engine components, to rivaling the mighty Mercedes engine in power and even beating them out in reliability. That's a tale that deserves more coverage. I remember the day when Max won Austria 2019. Alonso must be kicking himself now, yet another self-inflicted bad career choice.

[Cyborg]

Originally Posted by Vid6639

Did you not hear the radio message from Masi? He said his first priority is to clear the track and get the race started. He will come back on what to do with back markers later. Which is what they did.

Masi flip flopped, he initially said “lapped cars would not be allowed to unlap themselves”, however just a little later he went back on his earlier decision and allowed only the 5 cars between Hamilton and Max to unlap themselves. It’s important to note that Alonso, Ricciardo and Stroll were not allowed to unlap themselves, why? Is racing to be allowed only between position 1 and 2? It was a farce in the name of allowing racing, if it wasn’t then all cars should have been allowed to unlap themselves.

https://thesportsrush.com/f1-news-it...-abu-dhabi-gp/

Please go through the article above, it’s also clearly mentioned in it.

Cheers

[SilentEngine]

Originally Posted by Fiestaboy

We are all concentrating on only one side, "the stewards & race Director Masi".
Did we see how much radio messages go from Toto & Horner when there is an incident/ crash between the lead drivers? (all across the season).

In a tense environment like F1, with time running like anything, Stewards/ race director shouldn't be interrupted by Team Principals. If any changes need to be done in stewards policy, this should be the first. Stewards will do a better job, if Toto/Christian don't call them in mid-race.

You are right about the pressure Horner and Wolff put on the race director, it's really something. Team principals always had access to Race director, and this is not new at all. It was quite common when Charlie was around too. Whenever drivers complain of something, it was common to hear engineers respond saying they are talking to Charlie.

But Stewards are different. I don't think team principals have access to stewards during the race.

What has changed now is
1. FIA-Team communication is now broadcasted during live TV, this wasn't the case when Charlie was around (at least i don't remember from 2018 season and earlier). This has spiced up things with fans getting to hear the communication as it happens.
2. Masi is nowhere near Charlie's level, and this shows.

[Chetan_Rao]

Originally Posted by rkv_2401

...
They had a 'race' in Spa

A farce perpetrated to meet financial contractual obligations, should've been abandoned (other races were for circumstantial reasons so why not this one?) or rescheduled (if possible). I suspect race control weren't the decision makers that day, FOM more likely.

Max and Lewis race the way they do because the rules let them...

Applies to all of them. On the race track, hold every competitor and situation to the same standard irrespective of reputation, pedigree or championship standings, and watch them fall in line. Doesn't matter if they moan about it, as long as they comply. Actually, slap on some of the infamous 'bringing the sport into disrepute' charges for badgering the officials for good measure.

It's also absurd if people somehow feel inconsistent stewarding at Abu Dhabi counts for any more than at the other 21 races of the season. As long as all races count for equal points (as they usually have except that ill-conceived experiment with double points a few years ago), it makes no difference if a dodgy decision at round 1 or 22 impacted the final classification. The title wasn't decided based on just one race, the litigation (if it happens) shouldn't be limited to one either, if fairness is the expected outcome and not just 'let's litigate whatever gets us what we want'.