Right. As for Vettel, what happened last Sunday isn’t an isolated incident.
Sebastian Vettel started the Canadian Grand Prix on pole position, led the race from start to finish, and crossed the finish line first. Yet, he wasn’t declared as the winner of the race. On the face of it, that outcome sounds implausible. However, that’s precisely what happened in the 2019 Canadian Grand Prix last Sunday.
After 70 pulsating laps of racing, the only thing that everyone was talking about was the 5-second time penalty given to Vettel–a penalty that made Lewis Hamilton the race winner. On lap 48, Vettel made a driver error. He went off track, cutting the turn three chicane and across the grass, and then re-joining the circuit straight into the path of the closely following Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton. The incident could have caused a collision or forced Hamilton into the concrete wall on the outside.
The race stewards investigated and determined that Vettel had “re-entered the circuit unsafely.” The punishment was a 5-second time penalty. There were huge implications. As long as Hamilton stayed within 5-seconds behind Vettel, then Hamilton would win the race without the need to overtake Vettel and his Ferrari. And that’s what happened.
Firstly, as a motor racing fan, I believe in an ideal world. All races and results would be determined on the race track by overtaking moves and excellent driving skill and ability. The result? The position you cross the finish line is the position you end up with in final race results and classification. At the same time, rules and punishments must be in place and also must be adhered to. Otherwise, there would be anarchy and Formula 1 racing would become like a destruction derby.
In this case, the rules are clear.
If a driver leaves the race track, he must re-enter safely, which means not causing a risk or danger to any other driver. When Vettel re-joined the track, he went across the circuit to the outside line and into Hamilton’s path. That caused Hamilton to take evasive action.
Sebastian Vettel’s argument against punishment–consistent with how the majority who witnessed the incident saw it–is that after going across the grass, he was not in full control of the car as it suffered over-steer. It was unintentional the way he re-joined the circuit. He could do little else in that situation.
However, the penalty he received wasn’t for ‘intentionally causing an accident.’ It was for rejoining the ‘racing line’ without control and at speed deemed by the stewards to be unsafe to other drivers.
What hasn’t been mentioned by most observers is that a situation very similar to what happened last Sunday occurred during the running of the 2018 Japanese Grand Prix. There, the Red Bull of Max Verstappen left the circuit and cut across a chicane, much like Vettel did, and it was the Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen that had to take avoiding action. Verstappen re-joined the circuit directly in front of his Ferrari. The punishment was a 5-second time penalty to Verstappen, precisely like what Vettel received in Canada last Sunday.
Of course, no two races or incidents are identical. However, those two incidents are quite similar and were judged similarly. What’s more, I believe most motor racing fans want stewards’ decisions and penalties to be made with consistency, and–at least from where I sit–consistency was followed in these two, yet separate, incidents.
What else is there to say about what happened last Sunday? It’s this. Sebastian Vettel made an error at a critical moment of the race when under intense pressure. Following the Bahrain Grand Prix earlier this season, I wrote about how Vettel had made a number of mistakes during on-track battles with other drivers over the past year. Sunday’s mistake wasn’t a mistake during an attempted overtaking maneuver. It was a mistake when being put under huge pressure at a critical point in the race.
There’s more to this story, too. It’s how Vettel reacted, including his protests against the time-penalty, initially refusing to go to the usual parc-ferme podium position, moving the #1 sign from in front of Hamilton’s car to where his car should have been, and his press conference comments, when he said that he “wished he raced in a different era.”
Vettel’s reactions generated a lot of agreement, getting most fans on his side, concurring with Vettel that he had been harshly treated. As a result, the penalty and the rights-or-wrongs of it have been all that has been talked about. Whatever your opinion of the penalty, the truth remains evident: without the error from Vettel in the first place, the stewards wouldn’t have had a decision to make.
But there’s another reason not to look at this error in isolation. It offers yet more evidence that Sebastian Vettel makes many minor, yet basic, mistakes when racing under increasing pressure.
Where are we now? The Canadian Grand Prix now over–the 7th of 21 Formula 1 races in the 2019 season–Vettel has yet to win. Championship leader Lewis Hamilton, on the other hand, has won five races thus far, including the last three in a row.
Hamilton is now 62 points ahead of Vettel in the Driver Championship standings–in a season that started with many believing that Ferrari had the fastest car and that Vettel would be the favorite to achieve his 5th Drivers World Title. That outcome is looking extremely unlikely–even with the season being only one-third complete.
Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel can complain about being unfairly punished–and they may be right in regards to the penalty issued. However, it was another race–just like in Bahrain–where a mistake deprived them of what should have been a deserved victory.
