Fair enough, the crash effectively nullified pit strategy, and denied Ferrari any chance to try and jump Checo/Max (for this reason I’m really not a fan of teams being able to change tyres during a red flag, other than for safety reasons), but the race was effectively lost when Ferrari lost track position to the Red Bulls with their strategy failure during the transition to inters/slicks.
The thing is, how would you determine what is/is not a safety reason? And it would be unfair to a driver who has a pit stop sized lead but whose tires only have a couple of laps life left in them!
How safe is safe is a debate which could go on forever, particularly in motorsport.
IIRC at some point in the distant past teams were not allowed to change tyres under a red flag but it led to incidents due to drivers trying to avoid a pit stop on worn/incorrect tyres so the rule was scrapped.
Really Ferrari could do with IMO poaching a couple of strategy people from elsewhere in the pitlane, e.g. Bernadette Collins, because whoever is/was doing it for the past few years hasn't learnt from their past mistakes.
While the FIA got it more or less right with this years aero rules, it does seem like they could use a hand with race direction after the chaos yesterday over start time and tyres. Credit where it's due, at least we now know that the white line is the edge of the track! - only taken a few decades to sort that one...
Most of it. Between bad tactical calls and unreliability they will hand Red Bull the title.
Certainly seems that way, which is a shame.
I think they already have.
I disagree. Verstappen clearly had the fastest car/was the faster driver.
We are only just a third of the way through the season. All teams are experiencing unreliability. It’s the nature of the beast.
I think it’ll be most interesting in the final 3rd of the season, when teams are approaching budget caps and have to trade parts for points.
Yet another example of the halo saving a drivers life.
There's footage on twitter taken by fans who were sat right above that fence, very frightening for them too, good job they were above a very strong and high safety fence.
I have seen it. WOW. it is awful.
I wonder if after the race Silverstone will look at that gravel trap as it looked like Zhou’s car hit a bump which caused it to flip over the tyre barrier.
On a perfectly flat surface, a damaged car will flip over its tethered tyre very easily.
The fence did its job but the spectators in that stand were pretty close to joining in the accident!
F1 have a YouTube video (due to limitations, the video won't embed here):
It looked a little more damaged than that. He’d also run back to the pits to ask how to restart it after stalling. So it doesn’t seem that unreasonable that the marshals moved it.
I don't know how damaged it was, but in an interview during the stoppage he said that Mercedes were appealing the decision so it must've been drivable.
The car wasn't badly damaged but it was recovered by the marshals so he was out. No real issue there tbh.
There is a press shot on twitter that shows the car on its side behind the barrier with Zhou in the car.
I believe the basis of the appeal was that Russell told them not to move it but they moved it anyway, and that the race had already been red-flagged by that point. I don't think it would have been asking too much to let him take the restart start from the pit lane, given that he left the car initially to check on the safety of another driver.
