Amazingly If one were going to penalize Grosjean for a pass during this race it most certainly shouldn't have been this one, which was a great move and a clean pass. If one were to be in question it might have been the pass where he cut the corner "after" the pass, but even that one looked good at best and he should have been forced to give the position back only at worst. Sadly the penalty handed the race to Hamilton to loose, as Grosjean looked to be the only other competitor that "might" have been able to mount a challenge. For what ever reason, the stewards completely dropped the ball here, and you can't or shouldn't punish someone for past mistakes. Now ask yourself which team benefited most by Lotus not having two cars on the podium.....
Is there any doubt that Bernie/F1 would like to see Red Bull, MB and Ferrari atop the constructors championship at season end?
I was pretty satisfied with that race. McLaren did much better than I expected, and I was chuckling to myself for the twelve laps Jenson ran interference.
Just to put the penalty in the mirror (look at the other side)......the stewards do have access to the onboard video's. As close to the line as it looked on the broadcast replays, the on boards would have shown a much better view, right......?
The pass was replayed and replayed from all angles and even the announcers could not understand the penalty...one even wondering if they are going to penalise for good racing now. That said; in every kind of sport the umpires and referees make mistakes that could effect the outcome of the game, we human beings are not perfect, I would rather chalk this one up to that.
The stewards do have GPS access and that might have been the decider, but even so I read Massa saying that Grosjean didn't deserve it.
When second-guessing the stewards' actions during a race I like to know who the driver steward is so they have at least one face and personality rather than being just "the stewards." This time it was Allan McNish. He's a really smart guy and that makes it hard for me to imagine this being an uninformed or knee-jerk reaction penalty. But I still disagree with what they did based on the things I saw. I don't believe penalties are given out based on manipulation of results so I figure either they had access to something we didn't get to see or maybe there's some sort of connection to the first incident. For some reason they decided to study that first incident after the race and delay any potential penalty, then he got into another scuffle not much later. Maybe they figured he was reverting to Crashy Grosjean again and they needed to do something to get his attention? He was handed a 20 second penalty post-race for the incident with Button but it didn't affect his result.
This sort of thing makes me curious to know how the new driver penalty points system for next year will work. But what infringements equate to how many points and do they replace the other penalties we see now like drive-throughs, etc?
Heck had Grosjean not gone wide he & Massa would have ended their race right there. Was I the only one that saw Massa going wide to try & close the door? His wing was an inch from the Lotus. Sorry folks a BS call by the race steward. Me thinks Grosjean is still being punished for past deeds.
No you are not the only one who saw that. I do like McNish, heck I'm on his FB, but, and I honestly don't know, how long has he been a steward in F1?
The driver steward role rotates with a different pro driver at each race. There are drivers who've repeated though and McNish has done it a few times now, not sure how many races. He's also a member of the BBC F1 commentator team this year and, though I haven't seen/heard any of the BBC coverage, in addition to deferring to him as a current driver and relatively modern F1 driver I suspect he's also expected to be a sporting rules expert. That doesn't make him omniscient though and there are always a couple other stewards who are FIA fixtures. They're expected to be the true experts and provide consistency race to race and the driver is expected to provide a driver's perspective from both/all sides of any incident. In my mind the non-driver stewards are the ones likely to push for slapping the wrist of someone like Grosjean to remind him how they've told him he needs to act. On the other hand, I've heard McNish talking about young and/or amateur sports car drivers needing to be taught a lesson because of what he sees as reckless or overly aggressive driving when they negatively affect the race of a seasoned pro. Based on what I've known of the situations (admittedly very little) I've agreed with each comment like that I've heard him make, just pointing it out for full disclosure.
In 2011 he was steward twice, Monaco and Hungary. Both of those race he dinged Hamilton. The Wiki article does not say why.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CYsqHeylME]Pit Stop Feature by Williams F1 Team - Part 5 - Full feature - YouTube[/ame]
That's curious - the BBC played a clip from the car's on-board camera that clearly showed him going well outside the white line with all four wheels. And presumably this was from exactly the same feed that NBC were broadcasting.
I watched the Sky F1 feed, and I didn't see that. I wonder if FOM feeds different views to different networks.
I definitely didn't see that. Don't imagine the networks get different feeds. I think they get multiple feeds simultaneously with some on-boards and maybe others in addition to the main feed. With multiple views available at once they have producers monitoring and deciding what might be relevant and worthy of the broadcast. The broadcasters get to decide when to preempt the primary feed with replays, etc. Maybe the folks at NBC didn't notice that on the Grosjean on-board?