The end of the race under the safety car was debated yesterday, but nothing seems feasible to prevent this sometimes inevitable scenario. F1 wanted to avoid it last year in Baku with a red flag, and in Abu Dhabi with the fiasco of an early relaunch playing for the world title.
Like Mattia Binotto yesterday, Andreas Seidl confirms that the reflection on another procedure for this type of situation has been studied by the teams, but that the directors have not found a better alternative.
“After what happened last year in Abu Dhabi, there was a lot of discussion between the FIA, Formula 1 and all the teams involved to see how the rules could be changed to ensure that the races never end under a safety car,” Seidl said.
« But despite pressure from the FIA and Formula 1 that we find solutions, it was up to the teams to decide, and virtually all the teams could not agree on a better solution. »
« It would also be a fair solution in terms of sporting results. That’s why I guess we just have to accept that, unfortunately, situations like this can happen. »
“We haven’t found a better solution”
Although having thought about alternatives to allow the end of the race under the green flag, the teams found nothing fair on a sporting level: “In the end, we voted to keep the regulations as they were, and from what I remember, all the teams voted like that. »
« And while it might seem easy to create something like ‘automatically pull out a red flag’ and so on, in fact it’s not that simple. We’ve discussed this at length. We haven’t found a best solution. »
Mercedes F1 director Toto Wolff, meanwhile, recalls that the red flag must be raised under certain specific conditions of danger, as recalled in Article 57.1 of the Formula 1 Sporting Regulations.
« We put a red flag if someone is in the wall and if the track is blocked. We put a red flag because we can no longer pass, and something has happened. Why put a flag red at a race just because you want to put on a one or two lap show? »
« Discuss it with the FIA, say ‘let’s change the regulations, we want to have a really great last lap of the race’, and I raise my hand for that. But that’s not what’s in the regulations today. «
An inevitable “anticlimax”?
The president of the FIA, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, summoned the team directors on Monday, as he indicated Sunday noon. Several sporting topics need to be addressed and Christian Horner, the director of Red Bull, believes that this will now be addressed as a priority.
“It’s a process and there have been a lot of changes,” notes Horner. « There are obviously lessons to be learned. You could hear the public displeasure. »
« Team managers and the president are also getting involved to talk about certain aspects and I’m sure that will now be at the top of the agenda. We have to put problems on the table, but we have to avoid scenarios like this. that we had at the end of the race. »
The Briton admits he and his team would have liked a different finish: “Even winning the race was an anticlimax. We prefer to win the race in race conditions despite the risk of a restart. »
« It’s a bit of an anti-climax when you get that. It’s something that was discussed many years ago to avoid that scenario. I just felt like a mistake was made, that the wrong car was picked up and that delayed the whole process. »
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