2019 Canadian Grand Prix - Montreal June 7-9

[santos]

I'm just going to leave this here!

https://youtu.be/_gykAh22nbM

I really like Nico's point at the start of the video about the difficulty of pushing when you are in the lead. That's an insight I hadn't really appreciated.

i completely agree with Nico, Vettel and his engineers should have made him push hard and given everything in their engine to pull out a 5 sec gap or even try for it....instead they just cried over it and name calling everyone.

Yeah because it's really easy to pull a gap of 5 sec, when playing F1 2018 on the playstation... Newbie level. If it's easy in the game, it's easy in the real thing.

[siskue2005]

I really like Nico's point at the start of the video about the difficulty of pushing when you are in the lead. That's an insight I hadn't really appreciated.

i completely agree with Nico, Vettel and his engineers should have made him push hard and given everything in their engine to pull out a 5 sec gap or even try for it....instead they just cried over it and name calling everyone.

Yeah because it's really easy to pull a gap of 5 sec, when playing F1 2018 on the playstation... Newbie level. If it's easy in the game, it's easy in the real thing.

Or it is easy for newbie level in f1 2018 on PS4 to read the underlined part! If it's easy in the game, it's easy in the real thing.

[dans79]

Shortly after the incident It had grown to 3.3 seconds, but then his engineers told him about the penalty and he subsequently lost his mind.

[siskue2005]

Shortly after the incident It had grown to 3.3 seconds, but then his engineers told him about the penalty and he subsequently lost his mind.

yes after the incident Vettel pushed immediately and pulled 3.5 sec, then it all went downhill while he was name calling FIA

[NathanOlder]

Both of them are put into a position where they can give their opinion. They are entitled to do so. I don't care about their personal motivations. You either agree with them, or you don't. For the rest it's whether they bring a decent argument to the table or not.

After the race show on sky sports, Ted's notebook, Ted started with reading of the rules stating when rejoining the track whether you are in control of your car or not, you must leave a cars width when someone is a portion alongside your car. This according to Ted is in the rulebook.

This rule was 100% broken by Vettel in this incident , and I would love to hear Button, Brundle, Andretti ect answer this question directly and explain why Vettel shouldn't have been penalized.

That goes for everyone here who also disagrees with the penalty.

Right, so it's about the argument they bring forward which is good. Trying to complain about someone's motivations to bring out a silly argument to put him or herself into the picture and ironically being part of that through the complaining, that's not going to help (I am not talking about you).

Not sure why you felt to quote me on that though. The intent certainly wasn't for me to take a side. I am not expressing an opinion in favour or not in favour. My only intent was to keep people reasonable and listen to the different arguments as long as those arguments remain reasonable.

It was just as you and dans79 were talking about ex drivers

[NathanOlder]

Me too. Autosport explains:"
The footage clearly captures Vettel correcting an oversteer moment as he rejoins the track - which is shown by a sharp steering wheel movement to the right.

Shortly after that, Vettel has sorted the oversteer and begins steering to the left to follow the direction of the circuit - suggesting he is now under control.

But a split moment later, rather than keeping to the left, Vettel is shown to release the steering wheel - which allows his car to drift to the right, cutting off the route that Hamilton would have taken had he had clear space.

The movement to straighten the wheel, which put the Ferrari into the path of Hamilton's Mercedes, is believed to be key to the unanimous decision by the stewards to punish Vettel"

So he didn't oversteer helplessly to the wall, he checked his mirrors and steered there

Spot on this, it was obvious to me after 1 replay. how some cant see that is unbelievable , and why people post videos of things like monaco 2016 which shows the car in front leaving enough space

But regardless of Seb correcting oversteer or not, IT DOESN'T MATTER !!!! He cut Hamilton up dangerously, he rejoined in an unsafe manner, and you get penalties for that! Vettel fans should just be grateful it was only a 5 second penalty for crying out loud

[Restomaniac]

Shortly after the incident It had grown to 3.3 seconds, but then his engineers told him about the penalty and he subsequently lost his mind.

That could easily be due to Hamilton losing a shed load of time by having to slam on the anchors in an acceleration zone.

[NathanOlder]

If you think that the space Hamilton left was enough, then it's you who needs to go back and watch the Monaco race again. It's visible there was not enough space, but on top of that the line Hamilton forced Ric into was slippery because it was wet, as you've mentioned already. Ric even slided a bit.

To sum it up: Hamilton made a mistake, Ric kept his racing line, but was not only cut by Hamilton, but also forced to the wet side of the track (making him slide) and not given enough space too.

Yea... this surely was a completely different kind of incident and Hamilton was doing everything right, as ever. Just because.

So now you want Hamilton penalised for pushing someone on to the wet part of the track ? boo hoo hoo

Lewis left just enough space, Ric backed out of it as he was on the wet patch and it looked like the door was about to shut but it didnt actually shut.

[Bill_Kar]

Me too. Autosport explains:"
The footage clearly captures Vettel correcting an oversteer moment as he rejoins the track - which is shown by a sharp steering wheel movement to the right.

Shortly after that, Vettel has sorted the oversteer and begins steering to the left to follow the direction of the circuit - suggesting he is now under control.

But a split moment later, rather than keeping to the left, Vettel is shown to release the steering wheel - which allows his car to drift to the right, cutting off the route that Hamilton would have taken had he had clear space.

The movement to straighten the wheel, which put the Ferrari into the path of Hamilton's Mercedes, is believed to be key to the unanimous decision by the stewards to punish Vettel"

So he didn't oversteer helplessly to the wall, he checked his mirrors and steered there

Spot on this, it was obvious to me after 1 replay. how some cant see that is unbelievable , and why people post videos of things like monaco 2016 which shows the car in front leaving enough space

But regardless of Seb correcting oversteer or not, IT DOESN'T MATTER !!!! He cut Hamilton up dangerously, he rejoined in an unsafe manner, and you get penalties for that! Vettel fans should just be grateful it was only a 5 second penalty for crying out loud

Nobody really cares TBH. it's like Mccarthism, the stain will remain. No matter what, this will always be the "stolen" victory of Ferrari.

Nobody is putting up for a decent discussion, just throwing tantrums left and right.

It's a sad picture and it makes me wonder ;Do F1 really need these fans?

[NathanOlder]

In which case, Hamilton pits 4-5 laps later and is now stuck behind Leclerc whilst Vettel drives off into the distance. Net win for Ferrari, even after Hamilton passes Leclerc to take 2nd back. After all, who would be pressuring a slow-at-the-end Leclerc for 3rd? Bottas? He couldn't even stay in Leclerc's pit window.

How does Hamilton end up behind Leclerc ? you've lost me. If the undercut doesn't work then Leclerc cant force Hamilton to pit, so if Hamilton doesn't pit how does he end up behind Leclerc.

Apologies if I wasn't clear. The undercut clearly gave the driver on the road an advantage in the short term but penalised them in the long term on tyre life. It's this balance of benefit/loss that I was referring to.

This was a three car race for the podium positions so Leclerc was available to be used as a pawn to force Mercedes to compromise their strategy in order to prevent him gaining a position on Hamilton and slowing him for a number of the following laps (allowing Vettel to drive off into the distance without any pressure).

Clearly, the undercut was faster as it allowed Vettel to stay ahead of Hamilton, despite the latter having a faster car.

However, having rewatched the relevant portions of the race, I don't think Leclerc had a sufficient traffic window to make it work, so question answered.

Ah ok I'm with you now. Lets say the gap to 4th was big enough and Leclerc could pit and undercut, the only problem with that is, it risks Leclerc undercutting Seb. and that can't possibly be allowed to happen

[Just_a_fan]

The funniest bit of the whole incident, other than Vettel's childish behaviour in the pits*, is Vettel/Ferrari fans trying to make out that somehow Hamilton was at fault. Or that an incident that was nothing like the Sunday one was somehow the same and thus set some form of precedent.

The real precedent was set last year when Max got a 5 second penalty for doing basically the same thing - but without a wall to run his opponent in to.

*his behaviour on the podium was more fitting for his position in the sport. His silliness before that was not.

[The Black Knight]

The funniest bit of the whole incident, other than Vettel's childish behaviour in the pits*, is Vettel/Ferrari fans trying to make out that somehow Hamilton was at fault. Or that an incident that was nothing like the Sunday one was somehow the same and thus set some form of precedent.

The real precedent was set last year when Max got a 5 second penalty for doing basically the same thing - but without a wall to run his opponent in to.

*his behaviour on the podium was more fitting for his position in the sport. His silliness before that was not.

Hard to argue with any of that. I also personally think he should have had a season long ban for Baku 2017 and intentionally driving into another opponent. He has gotten away with a lot of petulant behaviour over the last couple of years has Sebastien and it's about time the FIA put a stop to it. Then if he wants to hang up his reigns then so be it. F1 is bigger than one driver, or team for that matter, including Ferrari.

[drunkf1fan]

I'll try to add a couple of new points of view here:

First, I think Vettel did try to cut in front of Hamilton to force him to slow down and ruin the pass. I don't think he tried to crash or force a crash, just to squeeze enough for Hamilton to hesitate. Had he succeeded in leaving exactly 1.1 car width´s space there, he would have looked like a hero and kept the position with Hamilton still lifting off as he would be mostly on the grass and unsure of how small the gap was going to get. So it was a valid, cheeky, instinctive maneuver that actually could have worked out for Vettel.
As it was, he left 0.9 car width´s, and IMO, that sealed the Stewards´s decision. One can only measure so precisely in tenths of a second, and this one came just in the wrong side of 1.0.

A different take: Maybe Vettel could have kept his car more to the left (the Stewards seem to think so). But let's say that he couldn't, that the trajectory taken was indeed the tightest possible and the earliest possible point to regain proper control of the car. It is of course possible, but then he was extremely lucky to regain control with the car pointed straight and the outside wheels exactly on the kerb, allowing him to smoothly apply throttle again. He might have been lucky or he might have aimed there, and we might never know which it was, but to my eyes, that corner exit is way, way too smooth and precise to be forced or accidental.

And talking about Leclerc and Ferrari: Once Vettel did get his 5 second penalty, am I the only one to think that if he could not get away from Hamilton, he could at least have slowed down? It would have been a team decision: slow down enough (he kind of did anyways, be it anger of fuel saving or something else) that Hamilton would have to either try to pass on track, still risky, or accept being pushed into Leclerc's view, which might have yielded a Leclerc victory after all (do I even dare to say that it would have been a Ferrari victory?). But, being controversial now, the fact that Ferrari "forgot" to tell Leclerc about Vettel´s penalty probably speaks volumes about Ferrari's concept of "team" right now.

I would say he left a lot less than .9 of a cars width. The measurement is taken to the edge of the track, not to the wall beyond the track. So he left him about a foot of space as Hamilton had to go out over the kerbs to avoid him. In terms of consistency, here is the Verstappen/Kimi incident from Japan last year. It's almost identical in how it played out and in this case Ferrari complained to the stewards and Verstappen got a 5 second penalty.

https://twitter.com/f1/status/104885360 ... 72?lang=en

Yup, agreed really. The reason for the penalty is less that he left him less than a cars width on the track which he came no where near achieving, it's that he left him less than a cars width into the wall. As others have stated, you can see on the video the snap is early, he catches it and at this point no penalty, but then he both accelerates and is turning sharply away from the wall as his angle on entering the track had he gone straight would have taken him directly into the wall. So he's turning left and imo completely in control. IF he sees Hamilton coming specifically or just uses common sense and assumes the guy who was <1 second behind him for lap after lap was going to be pushing him on the racing line, as his line starts to take him more parallel with the wall he opens up the steering wheel when he could have continued turning left (as he had been with no control issues since the snap) and even just maintained that current gap to the wall if not opened it up to be reasonable. Instead he opened the steering wheel and closed the gap and pushed Hamilton, now alongside off track and ever closer to the wall.

From what I understand the stewards gave the penalty because of what they saw Vettel doing on the steering wheel and for me that can only mean that they agree that once he was under control he had the opportunity to turn tighter and leave more space but chose not to.

The fans reaction to it is dismaying. A for me fairly obviously dirty move that actively stopped what would have been great racing from Hamilton, that is piling on pressure for laps till Vettel made a mistake and left an opening. Apparently this is what everyone wants, great racing, but when Vettel does something unfair I think because people are fed up at Ferrari's lack of execution leading to Hamilton and Mercedes dominance, they wanted a Ferrari win and so many are seeing this incident in an exceptionally biased way. Sky's coverage of it has been embarrassing and feeding into the frenzied response and fans are all up in arms because they seem to be ignoring the facts. Oh he lost a bit of control so it's a racing incident (something for which one driver isn't wholly or majority at fault for... what) and he had no choice but to go that wide.


It's been amazing watching the mental gymnastics going on with this situation. FIA ruined the race because they stopped Hamilton having a fair chance to overtake.... but apparently Vettel doing that and going unpunished wouldn't have ruined the races one chance for that overtake to happen. Brundle with his years of "where's the gravel, mistakes should be punished" morphs into "why should he be punished, if there was a huge tarmac run off he'd have floored it and stayed ahead"... ignoring that had he done that he would have deserved a penalty for gaining an advantage anyway.

LoL

I guess any discussion with Hamilton fans is pointless

Well yes, if you don't want to take off ferrari red colored glasses of bias and discuss civilly and with limited bias then, yes, discussion is pretty pointless for you.

Can you give me a straight reason why this move was penalty and Monaco 2016 wasn't? IMHO It's EXACTLY the same.



Can you give a reason why Mexico 2016 T1 wasn't a penalty?

And finally why Germany 2018 wasn't a penalty for Hamilton?

If anyone of you Hamilton fans says that he should have received a penalty in Monaco, I will say that Seb got what he deserved. Then we can discuss why do we (maybe) have double standards, or something else.

Look at a reverse angle of Monaco 2016, Ricciardo had like a car width + 2 feet or even more than that. He panicked backed out and lost a bit of grip in the wet from doing so. THere was WAY more than enough space. Like ridiculously more.

Mexico, he locked up hard, if he'd turned hard to the right he'd have come on in the racing line of the entire pack, coming on there would have caused a MASSIVE accident. When he rejoined at the next corner which would be vastly safer he immediately backed off to close the gap he gained on Rosberg. It's that simple, he went out of his way to give back the advantage and Rosberg was less than a second behind him when the safety car went out a couple corners later (I forget what for though tbh).

Germany, someone created a nice long list of penalties people got for the same thing, everyone else got a reprimand for anything similar to what he did, only people who entered the pits late or crossed the white lines early on exit (which includes Hamilton in the past) got a penalty beyond a reprimand. His penalty was directly in line with how everyone else was treated.

[dans79]

No matter what, this will always be the "stolen" victory of Ferrari.

Only to a small subset of the fan base that thinks anything less than domination is unacceptable.

[timbo]

Shortly after the incident It had grown to 3.3 seconds, but then his engineers told him about the penalty and he subsequently lost his mind.

yes after the incident Vettel pushed immediately and pulled 3.5 sec, then it all went downhill while he was name calling FIA

It went downhill for the same reason he let Ham from 4.9 sec into DRS zone after the pitstops (which caused the error):

Hamilton began hauling Vettel back in for the next few laps as Vettel tried to look after his fuel. “The numbers on the steering wheel are correct,” he was informed. “Act accordingly.”

https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/repo ... rix-report
He tried to stretch the gap but he was fuel critical.