Stewards Decisions in F1
- This topic has 9 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 9 months ago by
.
- Posts
Is it just me or have we started to get a bit silly with decisions. When I think back to my first years of watching F1 we often had “racing incidents” of the like that we saw in Canada yesterday. What we didn’t have were hundreds of penalties for “causing an avoidable accident”. It seems like we see them in most races now, and I worry that it’s taking away from the spectacle. While I don’t want drivers to be taking each other off at every corner it would be nice to let get to the end of a race that hasn’t been impacted by drive through penalties, or worrying that the order will change when various time penalties are handed out.
What do you think? Is there too much interference from the stewards? Has the sport started to favour the driver in position too much? Or am I the only one that thinks the penalties have gone a little bit mad of late.
I think the number of investigations and penalties isn’t the problem, it’s just that drivers have been making a lot of stupid moves recently that have resulted in crashes that could so easily have been avoided. i.e: di Resta last night and Hamilton in Monaco.
This is Formula 1, not Formula 3. If you’re making careless moves into gaps that are always going to disappear and you make contact, you should be investigated in my opinion.
I think there is far too much interference. Twice in two races Paul di Resta has been penalised for breaking his own front wing with no damage to the guy he hit. How does that make sense? Hamilton looked like being penalised for touching Webber even though it was a legitimate move and he came off a wet kerb. I don’t understand this obsession with having to investigate every little bump and punish 90% of them. It’s like the stewards don’t care that someone’s race has been ruined, just that someone somewhere has touched another car. It’s ludicrous.
This is Formula 1
Yes, the supposed pinnacle of racing. If drivers couldn’t make passing moves for fear of contact there’d be none except DRS and slipstream overtakes. People are going to touch each other, it’s inevitable and unavoidable.
How do you judge if a gap is ‘always going to disappear’? A gap only disappears if another driver slots into it. If someone is charging down the inside it’s very irresponsible for them to just close the door because the attacking driver in most cases has no way of pulling out in time. No driver has to wave another through, but no driver has the right to force another off the road either.
I was thinking about this last night and wondering which moves from the past might result in penalties had they been racing nowadays – Panis on Irvine at Monaco ’96 is one such instance.
I think the volume of investigating penalties is getting a touch ridiculous, but as long as the right decisions are made in the end I don’t think it really matter.
Twice in two races Paul di Resta has been penalised for breaking his own front wing with no damage to the guy he hit. How does that make sense?
Because it damaged his front wing, which means that it had the potential to do damage to the car in front, even if that car escaped unscathed on both occasions. The FIA seem to have a new philosophy of prevention rather than cure. We saw it with the safety car before the race stoppage – it was deployed two or three laps because it was really needed, “just in case” something happened. By penalising di Resta for those incidents, they’re trying to stamp out his behaviour before he actually does take someone out.
It’s just a case of handling the drivers with kid gloves too much. And it probably didn’t help that Gary Connelly was one of the stewards in Montreal – he is, after all, the man who destroyed the WRC with the idiotic “Super Rally” rules and shortening events to be more television-friendly. With Connelly, it’s really a case of “It’s not broken, so why are you trying to fix it?”
?’If you see a gap and don’t go for it, you are no longer a racing driver’
…is a good candidate for the quote most frequently taken out of context in the history of Formula One. Senna said this in response to questions over his collision with Prost in the 1990 season finale. Over a year later he admitted that the collision had been deliberate on his part.
If Mikael Schumacher had done what Button did to Hamilton, FIA would probably of banned him for life.
Ridiculous that Button can get away with it…(Hamilton could of been really injured when he bounced into the wall)but then again it was a long time since any other team won a race other than Red Bull.
gogo
Because it damaged his front wing, which means that it had the potential to do damage to the car in front, even if that car escaped unscathed on both occasions. The FIA seem to have a new philosophy of prevention rather than cure.
I had thought of that. Doesn’t seem to be working though does it? We’re getting more and more penalties each race!
Unless someone comes worse off or retires and the instigator is unscathed, I don’t think anything really warrants a penalty. It’s too late to change things and penalties don’t really discourage anything other than the most severe breaches. In fact you could argue that driver agreements have done much more than penalties to clean up the racing.
If you take a step back, and really think about how many unethical or penalty deserving moves we have seen all this season, you will realise that they weren’t all that many. Yet there have been a ridiculous amount of penalties handed out this year.
Alonso and Hamilton coming together in Malaysia didn’t deserve a penalty, nor did Di Resta and Hamilton really deserve penalties for their moves at the hairpin at Monaco. The Hamilton-Maldonado incident was questionable, and probably a good incident to investigate. The Perez and Sutil accident in China was also worth investigating.
I dont have any stats on how many penalties have been handed out by the stewards this year, but my guess is that only half of them are genuinely worth handing penalties for.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.