“Was the decision of a five-second penalty (to Leclerc in Japan) right or wrong? In our view, honestly, he didn’t gain any advantage. And at least in such a situation why are you not listening to the drivers while you are doing it in Singapore? “Certainly I think it is very frustrating to see very different timings in decisions seven days after. “The five-second penalty of Singapore should have been given immediately, which would have given us the opportunity to manage certainly a lot differently the situation, and it could have been a potential victory. ![]() With only half the race distance finished when the chequered flag flew in Japan given the time-certain finish required to beat sunset, most assumed Verstappen was on for only 19 points rather than the full 25 - which means even with Leclerc’s penalty he couldn’t open enough of a gap to seal the deal.īinotto’s argument was that it took the stewards hours to hand Perez a fairly lenient punishment for breaking safety car rules in last week when a quick penalty would have given Leclerc a chance to close the gap to the Mexican and capitalise on the penalty, but in Japan they refused to heard evidence from either driver before judgment. The FIA subsequently changed the rules to ensure lap shad to be completed under green flags to qualify a race for points and also created a new points rubric, whereby a sliding scale of points is a warded based on whether 25 per cent, 50 per cent or 75 per cent of the race has been completed. The confusion stems from last year’s Belgian Grand Prix, where two laps behind the safety car qualified as a ‘race’, allowing half-points to be awarded in farcical scenes. There was even much dismay when post-race interviewer Johnny Herbert announced Verstappen had won the title, with the teams, drivers, commentators and even much of the media believing the points weren’t yet in his favour. POINTS CONFUSION COLOURS POST-RACE CELEBRATIONSīut even after Verstappen crossed the line there was significant confusion about whether he’d done enough to claim the championship given the points permutations of the shortened race, which just ticked over to lap 28 - a touch over half-distance - when he took the chequered flag. Given the 20 drivers in Formula 1 are all generally pretty good, competition between them is supposed to be closer when the heavens open.īut then here’s 25-year-old Max Verstappen running rings around the competition - even coming close to lapping the field despite the grand prix running only around half distance. When they say that rain is a great leveller, they mean that car differences tend to mean less in the wet and that driver skill tends to come to the fore. That’s an even greater advantage than he had over the field at the full-distance Belgian Grand Prix in dry conditions. ![]() ![]() He won by 27 seconds at the flag, and advantage of 1.2 seconds per lap. The Japanese Grand Prix featured 22 racing laps after the first six spent behind the safety car. VERSTAPPEN WINS THE TITLE WITH SUPERLATIVE PERFORMANCEĭespite the utter chaos that surrounded the race - the weather, the safety controversy, the restart, the post-race penalty, the points uncertainty - nothing can be taken away from Max Verstappen, who dominated the race with an ice-cold display of domination.
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