2025 Spanish Grand Prix - Barcelona-Catalunya May 30 - June 1

[SiLo]

The touch with Charles is a non story. Touch on the straight, with no damage or compromised pace from either car.
Max was the slower car being overtaken and held his ground when the position was lost. In fact I would say he was pushing Charles into the marbles on the right side. Charles drove by and was merging onto the racing line not expecting Max to be holding firm when he had no reason to be there anyway.
It's nothing. The event didn't even last a millisecond. Had Max stayed on the left, he would have been able to defend from Russell.

Another case of someone judging the incident based on the outcome, and not objectively looking at the actions.

Charles goes to overtake and then cuts back across and makes contact with Max. And slight differences and both of them are heading into the wall at 170mph.

[ringo]

There is no cutting back taking place there. As someone else put it beautifully, there was not ill intent to crash into Max. Charles was going onto the marbles because Max was coming over to the center. Charles had the overspeed on Max and simply tried to merge onto the racing line by inching over. It's normal racing. No crash was going to happen there.
Rubbing is racing.
Targeting another car to damage it out of frustration is dangerous. It could 170mph or 30 mph. You just never know what can happen. A car can catch fire after being pierced by a front wing, or shrapnel can fly and cut the driver, a wheel can come off and roll and hit a steward. Things can get real really fast, and a driver can even be criminally charged if the accident was actually intentional and some got hurt, or god forbid maimed or killed because some guy had a tantrum.

[vorticism]

"Collision" being rendered usefully vague there. I guess a collision could be anything from bumping tires and causing no loss of car control, to damaging bodywork, to shearing the car in half at the engine-monocoque interface. If a collision is bumping into another car without…

LMAO the gaslighting. Get out of here…

The stewards took a middle ground, penalized him as much as they could while still saving face, which is to say, they gave him the maximum 3 points they could give from the “caused no immediate consequences” type of collision (page 3 in your doc). That much of the letter of the rule they could pull off. To get 4 points they’d have to go with the “apparent reckless intent” although this would have opened a can of worms for them because it is at odds with the Steward’s Guide encouraging exactly that. Verstappen could have appealed with “well, was I ahead at the apex or not?” which gets into a discussion about the guide and the usefulness of encouraging “claiming” of a corner. So they just compromised and said it was an oopsie, not for Max’s benefit, but for their own.

It’s worth remembering that George’s and Charles’ collisions occurred at high speed sections of the track, yet neither were reprimanded, given 5 or 10 s nor grid penalties, nor given 1-3 penalty points, despite falling afoul of the same wording they used on Max (“causing a colllision with no immediate consequences”), while Max’s middle finger to the Stewards Guide was done, intentionally, at a low speed corner using a wheelbase-aligned tire bump which avoids the tires contacting the bodywork, so that both drivers could continue on i.e. he was sending a message. It’s more interesting that he got 3 points instead of 4 points because it shows us that the stewards thought Max’s move was intentional (it was) but they also don’t want to open up the discussion about the stewards guide and how it encourages collisions with the “ahead at the apex” wording. Check.