Charmed Life

Red Bull drivers led a charmed life on Sunday.

While no one can dispute that Vettel got his act together when it mattered and managed to be in the right place at the right time, much of his spectacular result can be placed at the feet of profiting from the Safety Car periods that happened when he did. Further, while all the chatter about him passing a car while outside the white lines on lap fourteen, I counted no fewer than four changes of direction while he vigorously defended his position.  Vettel comes away very fortunate that he was permitted to continue without a sterner penalty than just giving back the position.

Webber, on the other hand.  His first collision I can excuse as a racing incident.  The collision with Massa similarly I would be willing to write off as a racing incident.  But my view is he caused Massa to spin -- the long-lens footage is inconclusive, but the in-car camera from Massa's car clearly shows Webber charging back on-track in front of the Ferrari, causing Massa to take abrupt avoiding action.

Massa was right to be incensed that no action was taken.  I wonder how the stewards would have ruled had Massa failed to take avoiding action and clobbered the Red Bull instead?

The comentators gleefully claiming that Webber had "frightened Massa into a spin" didn't help, either.

Frankly when Webber happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often and got clobbered by Grosjean's avoiding action, I thought it was merely karma.

It isn't in Webber's history to drive like this.  I hope this is merely a one-off performance, and not an indication of things to come.

Idiot Officials

Well here we are race two, and already we have a stupid decision from the stewards to wrangle with*:

Hamilton was penalised for making more than one change of direction as he tried to defend his position from Alonso. The Spaniard, meanwhile, received the same (20 second) penalty for causing a collision with the British driver during the fight.

So basically Hamilton was weaving, while Alonso was penalized for driving into Hamilton -- because Hamilton was weaving.

Either Hamilton defended his line appropriately and Alonso was too aggressive, or Hamilton was defending his position too aggressively and Alonso is blameless.

Can't have it both ways.
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*= and why the hell is the press release detailing this not on the internet anywhere? All the sites I've checked just itemize the punishment without reprinting the text of the decision (which would be interesting to me, anyways) and the FIA site doesn't have it either.

Update: so OK now that I can actually find details of the penalties -- it looks like Hamilton and Alonso are being penalized for different incidents. Hamilton's transgression happened about two minutes before Alonso's:

The incident which caused Hamilton’s penalty was timed at 17.20 and the incident which caused Alonso’s penalty was timed at 17.22. Given the lap times involved one can say with some certainty that Hamilton’s penalty related to a move on lap 45, while Alonso’s penalty was linked to the collision on lap 46 that led him to pit at the end of the lap.

So the officials can have it both ways. Would have been nice if the text of the decisions had been actually available in a timely manner.

Hamilton Skates Again

So once again Valencia managed to produce more in controversy than outright racing. Although I will say that someone has been working very hard on either the track or the TV cameras -- there appeared to be acres of space available on the track, a far cry from the gerbil maze of the first year.

Lewis Hamilton continued his charmed 2010 career, bobbling the Safety Car transition. Ferrari is predictably incensed, although in retrospect the only difference Hamilton's behavour would have made would be his leading Alonso home in 9th place instead. Ferrari had extremely poor luck with this Safety Car, as drivers ahead could continue at racing speeds while Ferrari tooled around behind it, and drivers behind managed to pit before getting caught up in the train.

Even the penalties which were liberally handed out after the fact were a whopping five second each and had little practical effect on the result. Even though Hamilton's drive through had a total of zero effect on the running order due to the stewards' waiting so long to assign a penalty and the Sauber holding up the rest of the pack, one can make a compelling argument that the drive-through time penalty meant Hamilton was in fact penalized the most strongly for the Safety Car transgressions. While the stewards had a lot of things to think about, they clearly didn't trouble themselves too much about any of it.

That's racing. Ferrari drew the bad luck this time. Get over it.

Schumacher On Thin Ice

Perhaps I'm in a minority, but I never particularly liked Micheal Schumacher. Right from the moment he moved over on Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez in an attempt to grab a driver's championship I filed him under "suspicious". I had been more charitable about his collision with Hill, I presumed that post-crash his car was not as controllable as it should have been and the subsequent collision with Hill was an unfortunate accident. Schumacher was living up to the category I'd filed him in, that being "fast but crashy".

Well those unfortunate accidents seem to follow Schumacher around like a little puppy, and yesterday we saw a couple more.

The collision with Kubica? The Renault had the line, Schumacher just wasn't going to give it up. Unfortunately for Kubica, he later flushed his credibility with that move around Sutil that the stewards judged to be dangerous, and Schumacher got the benefit of the doubt.

Then Massa came up on Schumacher and in the final chicane they came together. Schumacher arguably made a second move when lining up for the chicane, and this move cost Massa his front wing. Again, Massa compounded his woes by speeding in the pit lane when coming in for the wing change, and again Schumacher got the benefit of the doubt.

Hopefully the stewards will not continue to be blinded by Schumacher's history of achievement and will dole out some suitable punishments in future should these incidents continue.

I'm quite sure that Micheal would not have permitted Ferrari to take these kinds of offences had they been committed by a mid-fielder against him.

Your Obvious News For The Day

Unsurprisingly, Hamilton thinks that the stewards' decisions have been just fine so far this year. Since he's gotten away with at least two questionable actions so far, he'd naturally think so.

Business As Usual

Well I was working enough this weekend that I somehow failed to get the PVR sorted, and being on the job this morning meant I couldn't catch the race live. But like any good commentator I can have an opinion about something I've not seen, right?

So what happened?

• Rain;
• Button making a lucky brilliant tire choice;
• collisions in the mid-field; and
• Hamilton doing something which feels vaguely improper in some way but somehow escaping from the incident with nothing more than a warning reprimand. (Sure do enjoy the difference these former-drivers-turned-stewards are making to the effectiveness of the rules enforcement, eh? What's going to be the magic term for the next race? He'll be "cautioned" instead?)

Sounds like business as usual at the FIA.

Driver Stewards: Not Impressed So Far

So one of the new ideas for 2010 is that one of the stewards at an event will be a former driver. The idea is that this driver can bring balance to the stewards council and the stewards will therefore be seen to be more fair and balanced.

The Malasian GP of 2010 pretty much puts lie to that theory.

The stewards made themselves noticed twice during this event.

First, Lewis Hamilton was fighting for position with Dmitri Petrov's Renault. Hamilton got past into turn one, but went deep and Petrov went by on the inside. Second time past, Hamilton went back and forth and back and forth down the main straight, an action that a lesser man might construe as "weaving". Hamilton defends himself:

I wasn’t weaving for him, I was weaving to break the tow.

The stewards took a look at this behavior, and decided that while it wasn't weaving, it wasn't sportsmanlike behavior, and Hamilton was warned.

Warned!

Either it was weaving, or it wasn't. If it was, it deserves punishment. If it wasn't, then it doesn't deserve notice.

Now the problem from this is that drivers may get the idea that they can drive like that once and they will get away with a warning.

Consider this -- had it been Petrov's Renault doing the weaving trying to break the tow, no doubt McLaren would have been screaming bloody murder and Hamilton would have some words about how dangerous it was. And I don't doubt for a second that the stewards would come down hard on Petrov.

The second time the stewards got involved was at the end of the race when it was determined that eventual race-winner Vettel had passed a Lotus under waved yellow conditions during the race:

During Sunday's race, the 22-year-old passed Lotus' Jarno Trulli while yellow flags were waving, and a stewards report said Vettel "did breach ... the international sporting code".

Despite this determination, no penalty was assessed, because...

But the stewards, including former Grand Prix winner Johnny Herbert, said the Red Bull slowed down in the yellow flag area, and noted that Trulli at the time had "an obvious problem".

...the "obvious problem" being that he was recognizing the yellow flags.

We won't see this decision tested, because the driver home in second place was the other Red Bull and there wouldn't be anything to gain by Red Bull protesting their own driver's conduct. But had the Mercedes been home in second place that close to Vettel's car, I'm quite sure there would have been a protest.

Both of these "decisions" are reminiscent of the FIA's clown-court favoritism that results in popular, or championship-leading, drivers being held to one standard while the rest of the field is held to another. The only thing lacking from this weekend was a decision against a back-marker driver that was similarly marginal, defended by the paper equivalent of shrugging shoulders and a "well them's the rules, sorry" explanation.

Having the drivers on the stewards board was supposed to eliminate this type of circus.

I'm not impressed so far.