algebraist wrote: ↑07 Sep 2020, 04:37
I normally don't post on race threads but here goes ...
Hulkenberg has a car failure of some description, I really don't care what it was only that he had it. He does the decent thing by moving offline and crawling around the track for a section of barrier marked in orange paint. This indicates that there is an area with marshals that can move the car off track safely. Except in this case, the marshals have some sort of tent and table there so the area is completely useless.
So instead of clearing that out of the way and pulling the car back, the marshals and race organisers go "hey, the pit lane isn't far from here. push it there!" and they do. This instigates a full safety car (!) and a very rarely seen message to close the pit lane during this process.
In fact it's so rarely seen, that the message clarifying the situation is not immediately visible. It's instead on page 4 (!) of the timing sheets and in Mercedes case, only one person back at Brackley HQ spots it. By the time that's communicated back to pitlane, Hamilton has made an illegal pitstop. Wow.
Now we get to the track stuff. There's red lights on the left hand side of the track. Problem is it's a right hand corner and the drivers are understandably looking right so they miss it unless told by the team. Turns out there's a board being waved by the marshals prior to all this ... but it says "SC" with zero indication that the pitlane is closed.
The team on the pitwall get a strange SC X X type sign they've never seen before. As Diesel has stated in previous posts, there's no real explanation what this is or standardisation of this message according to the rules. Thus momentary confusion reigns.
So with all of this in mind, while Mercedes and Alfa Romeo did make a mistake and break the rules it wasn't exactly bloody easy to avoid? Chaos reigned supreme at this point!
I have enough blame for the marshals, the FIA and the teams to go round on this.
As for the rest of the race? What race? Stayed precessional after the restart with the exceptions of Raikonnen going backwards and Hamilton driving like a man possessed. Again. And we had Sky F1 commentator calling for reverse grid races for qualifying on the basis of this? Well I didn't have much respect for Crofty but he's just entered the Christian Horner gobshite arena now. Brundle managed to point "some" of this out but also got suckered by the reverse grid concept. Well, reverse grids work in spec series but F1 is NOT a spec series! This is the same knee jerk reaction to Canada 2011 that got us these shitty bubblegum consistency tyres.
For me this is just a new low. We've had mistake compounded on mistake here and it's provided some excitement but basically disguised an utterly dull race.