Carlos Sainz’s car, injured on Sunday, withdrawn from the Suzuka circuit. /
Analysis
Unclear regulations and, above all, the decision to remove the crane in Suzuka when the pilots were still shooting, have left the International Federation marked
Max Verstappen and Red Bull had everything ready to party at Suzuka. For weeks the weekend of the return to Japan had been marked in red, not only to strengthen the roots with Honda that has given them so much glory in recent times, but because they knew that mathematics was in their favor. The vigor with which Verstappen has won his second world title well deserved a scene with substance, where eleven other titles had been held in the past.
The rain on Friday was predicting a busy weekend. Of those that leave images for history, that are remembered by the annals. Everything seemed perfect for Verstappen, who even on Saturday saw how Ferrari’s cyclothymia was allied with him. This time there was no Charles Leclerc on pole, but it was himself. It was going to be a glory Sunday for him, but 24 hours after the milestone, it’s barely a footnote.
The FIA has been in charge of snatching the spotlight from the new two-time world champion. This Monday there is tangential talk about him, while the debate focuses on how a confusing and poorly redone regulation just a year ago left Verstappen himself not knowing whether he was world champion or not for a few minutes that seemed taken from a sitcom type ‘Modern Family’. “Am I champion or not?” Where in the known metaverse would anyone have imagined that the winner of two-thirds of the calendar would have such a doubt?
All for an expression: “If the race stops and cannot be restarted.” Therein lies the key. This last sentence had already appeared in the sports regulations since 1991, when they understood that something had to be done with the tests that were not completed due to rain. It was not something new, far from it, but they had all been governed by this rule: if 75% of the race was not disputed, half the points were distributed. Throughout the history of F1 in which fewer points had been given than the established ones, the same premise was maintained: not all the laps had been taken and it had not been possible to restart. These were Austria 1977, Monaco 1984 (Senna’s first podium), Australia 2001, Malaysia 2009 and Belgium 2021. It was the latter that forced the rule to be rewritten to avoid pantomimes such as seeing the drivers do three laps behind the safety car unable to get ahead.
The problem is that, until now, what happened on Sunday had never happened: a race stopped, restarted and completed… due to a time limit and not a lap limit. By reducing the maximum race time from four to three hours (to avoid what happened in Canada 2011), the total distance of the race was strictly completed when that time limit was reached, since the norm contemplates this. A law that did not contemplate all this combination of factors and that confused even those responsible for Red Bull. “Our statisticians had calculated that Max was one point short,” Helmut Marko later admitted.
“What is a crane doing there?”
Within the bad, this vaudeville was solved immediately. More problematic and controversial is the other great debate on Sunday. The current generation of drivers experienced their toughest moment at the Japanese GP, precisely in 2014. That day, the extremely talented Jules Bianchi lost control of his Marussia and crashed directly into the tow truck that was removing Adrian Sutil’s crashed car . After months in a coma, he died. He became the first fatality among the ‘gladiators’ since the long-awaited Ayrton Senna in San Marino 1994.
The regulations then changed. They realized that the double yellow flags to ask the drivers to slow down in the event of such a situation was not enough, they gave the order for red flags and, above all, a clear protocol was established: a crane must never go out on the track if the cars are not regrouped behind the safety car and, more than anything, never with them passing by.
That is what was not fulfilled on Sunday. When Carlos Sainz went against the wall due to aquaplaning that could have happened to anyone, someone ordered the pilot of the crane to get out. This went straight to the injured Ferrari, while the cars behind the safety passed… and in a few minutes Pierre Gasly, furious, wondered what that machine was doing in the middle of the track. Why he was going 200 km/h after being warned twice to slow down, no news, although he was later sanctioned.
All pilots, without exception, today cry out against the FIA. George Russell and Sebastian Vettel, as presidents of the GP Drivers’ Association, are going to put a red face on those responsible for setting clear and precise rules to ensure that the sport is safe and entertaining, in that order. It is inconceivable that not even ten years after the loss of Bianchi what happened happened.
That Verstappen’s title does not cover the shame of the FIA, or vice versa. There are four grand prizes left (one of them in the sprint) and much to decide. The best news is that the pilots are the protagonists and not an International Federation that is overregulated and incapable, it is obvious, of not showing its shortcomings every time a weekend is not idyllic.
