Category Archives: F1 News

Lewis Hamilton has followed up statements from Mercedes and Nico Rosberg with his own take on today’s meeting at the team HQ.

Hamilton said: “Today we came together as a team and discussed our differences. Nico and I accept that we have both made mistakes and I feel it would be wrong to point fingers and say which one is worse than the other.

“What’s important is how we rise as a team from these situations. We win and we lose together and, as a team, we will emerge stronger.

“There is a deep foundation that still exists for me and Nico to work from, in spite of our difficult times and differences.

“We have the greatest team, the strongest group of individuals who have worked their hands to the bone to give us the best car you see us racing today. It’s important that we never forget that and give them the results they deserve.

“Today, Toto and Paddy told us clearly how we must race against each other from now on in a fair and respectful manner. The fans want to see a clean fight until the end of the season and that’s what we want to give them.

“It’s going to be a tough road from here but Championships have been won from much further back than I am now. And I promise you that I will be giving everything and more to win this for my team, for my family and for my fans.”

Christian Horner says that Daniel Ricciardo continues to surprise Red Bull with his form, even after he proved in Canada that he could win races.

Although Sebastian Vettel was ahead in qualifying in Belgium Ricciardo once again outperformed the German on his way to a third win of 2014.

“In all honesty we never thought he would be as strong as he has been,” said Horner. “We knew he was fast, we knew he was a very good racing driver. But I don’t think any of us, not even Daniel, realised just how good he was going to be. And of course his confidence is sky high. He’s come in, he has no pressure, and he’s driving beautifully at the moment. He’s very economical with the car, with the tyres, and his pace is extremely good.

“I think he’s doing a phenomenal job, and he deserved the victory today. Everything we’ve seen of him, I think he’s incredibly calm and incredibly in control. I think he’s obviously marking himself out as a clear championship contender.”

Asked by this writer for his thoughts on Vettel’s ongoing struggles, Horner defended the German.

“A lot of things have gone wrong for him, even this weekend, a spark plug failure on Friday robbed him of a lot of time, so he has to take information from the other car, and we know their styles are quite different. Of course we need to check whether something’s actually broken on the car, because that was extremely unusual, what we saw.

“Sebastian has got the best feeling for these tyres, as history as shown. But we have to look into today, obviously there’s something wrong, that he wasn’t able to have the same pace as Daniel today and be harder on the tyre. Obviously we missed out on Friday and running of any real benefit to Seb. Of course we need to check whether something is broken on the car.

“We went for an aggressive strategy at the penultimate stop with Seb, which in hindsight… We were effectively racing Bottas, we’d been undercut by Raikkonen, so we pitted to cover Bottas. Bottas obviously stayed out and was able to pass Seb anyway, and at that point you think well we’re dropping back to the cars behind, so we elected to pit again, which gave Seb a bit of work to do in the lasts tint, but he drove fantastically over the last few lines to recover the positions.”

The big question this week is whether or not the FIA will decide to take another look at the Rosberg/Hamilton incident in the light of the Briton’s revelations about what happened in the team meeting.

At the time the stewards clearly regarded it as a racing incident, and indeed while they looked at it the incident was never even flagged up on the timing screens as the subject of a formal investigation with a ‘no further action’ outcome.

By the time Hamilton’s comments became public, the race weekend was in effect officially over and the results confirmed.

Lewis revealed that Rosberg said in the meeting that he could have avoided hitting his team mate, a choice of words that so close to the FIA phraseology of “causing an avoidable collision” that the governing body could easily justify a further look, especially given that a World Championship contender caused his direct rival to score no points. The impetus to go ahead could come from Jean Todt, if he is so inclined.

The procedure is quite straightforward. If the FIA decides that a “new element” has emerged, then the Spa stewards can be reconvened and can summon the relevant parties – the two drivers and the others in the meeting, namely Paddy Lowe and Toto Wolff and possibly Niki Lauda.

If it is not practical to reconvene the stewards, they can delegate the stewards of the next race in Monza to take over the task. While three of the Spa stewards hail from Germany, Belgium and Italy and are thus readily available, the problem may be ensuring the presence of Venezuela’s Vincenzo Spano.

The most recent example of stewards taking a second look came after the Massa/Perez incident in Montreal. Neither driver was interviewed at the time, as they had gone for medical checks, but the Mexican was penalised. However, lobbying by Force India led to Perez being given a chance to state his case in front of the stewards at the next race in Austria, with telemetry and his own evidence regarded as the new element.

However the most high profile instance came after the 2009 Australian GP, which by co-incidence also involved post race comments to the media by Lewis Hamilton – although in that instance he incriminated himself.

Jarno Trulli had passed Lewis under the safety car, but Lewis revealed straight after the race that he had been told to let him by. His story changed when he was later interviewed by the stewards, which led to a penalty for Trulli. The FIA later learned what Hamilton had said to the media, the case was re-opened the following weekend at the Malaysian GP, and Lewis was excluded.

The question is whether the Hamilton comments are regarded as a “new element,” the problem being that there is obviously no record of what was actually said in the meeting. Realistically the likelihood is that the FIA may regard getting to the truth as a futile exercise, and that there is no point in pursuing it.

However if the Monza stewards do look at the case it’s worth noting that the driver representative will be Derek Warwick, who made his own feelings clear in a BBC radio interview this morning.

“I think what Nico was trying to say is he’s had enough of the forceful driving of Hamilton at Bahrain and again at Budapest, and he wasn’t going to give in,” said Warwick. “What was stupid or silly of Nico was he did it on the second lap of a Grand Prix. That is unacceptable. You can’t have team mates take each other out. I agree with Toto Wolff, it’s totally unacceptable.”

However he stopped short of saying that the FIA should take action: “It’s a difficult thing. At the end of last year the drivers asked for the stewards to be more consistent, so we gave a few more penalties put for various incidents. Then about three races ago they asked the FIA to relax the rules and let guys sort it out on the track, and that’s effectively what’s happening at the moment. You can’t please the drivers either way. I think it’s something that we need to look at, but I think it’s an internal problem, not really a problem for the FIA or the stewards.

“They have to somehow reprimand Rosberg and make sure these two guys don’t touch each other. They said right from the beginning of the season that they are going to allow these two guys to race and if they’re going to do that they have to expect a massive fallout, and they have to expect what happened on Sunday.

The most likely outcome if Rosberg is deemed to have caused an avoidable collision would be a grid penalty in Monza.

Christian Horner says that Red Bull is keeping Mercedes honest by always being in the position to take advantage of any problems for the silver cars.

Red Bull was not expected to lead the chase in Spa, but a low downforce set-up helped Daniel Ricciardo to score an unexpected victory.

“We benefited from a get together from the Mercedes today,” said Horner. “But it’s good to be keeping them honest. This was a track that we didn’t expect to be competitive at, but we’ve managed to win there. It’s our third GP victory of the year, we’ve won in Montreal and Spa, which are the two most unlikely tracks that we would have picked pre-season. All we can do is focus on ourselves and go race by race. It’s remarkable that Daniel’s won only one less race that Nico so far this season.”

Horner admitted that he even after qualifying he didn’t have high expectations for Spa.

“I looked at the odds before the race. Sebastian was 20-1, and Daniel was 30-1. So I should think there are one or two happy customers out there if they were brave enough to put a bet on. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to put a bet on us, even with those odds, at this Grand Prix.

“Quite an incredible performance by Daniel. I think the strategy with the set-up that we elected to take, with the low downforce, enabled us to be quick in sectors one and three, and extract the most that we could out of the car. So sector two was always our weak point. But after the get together between the two Mercedes it was a question of getting Daniel’s head down and getting in with it.

“Of course we had the choice at the end, we thought that Nico would go for a new set of tyres at the end there. We could have covered him that we felt that keeping [Daniel] only 3s ahead on the same strategy was going to pout him in more danger than leaving him out.

“So we crunched the numbers very quickly and it looked like if Nico was 2.5-3s a lap quicker, it would be within a second at the end of the race. We gave Daniel a target on the lap time, and he hit all his markets, all his braking points. He never made a mistake, and got a brilliant victory. We gave him a target of a 1m53.4s, I think it was, that he needed to hit. That was based on Nico being on the 51s, and thankfully it just about worked out.”

Looking ahead to Monza, he joked: “We’re going to take the rear wing off, because I don’t think we can run much less downforce! If we’re competitive here hopefully we can be at least half competitive in Monza, but again it really lends itself to being a Mercedes type of circuit.”