George Russell looked to have pulled off the most sensational of victories with a drive so good, his boss Toto Wolff called him the “Tyre Whisperer”. However, the stewards stripped him of the win after the race. Why did they do that? What rule was broken? And what was the reaction?
www.formula1.com
That article pretty much points out all the details with the extenuating circumstances that this is Spa, resurfaced, and there is no warm-down lap to pick up debris, and the race was clean with no VSC or real safety car so higher fuel consumption so everyone who was short fueled (which is pretty much all the cars) had fuel preservation issues, so I expect that if all of the cars had been weighed there would have been a lot of underweight cars and anyone else who did a 1-stop also would have been underweight.
The rules do seem a bit silly, and I can see why they were implemented (to stop teams putting blocks of ice in cars and having the ice melt) but in this case the rules have created a
perverse outcome where the driver and team that took the risk of going 1 stop were penalized for their strategic success. It could have easily been the case that Russell's old hard tyres "fell off a cliff" performance-wise or even failed with 5 laps to go, and that is the risk side of the risk/reward choice for the 1 stop strategy, competitors would not have complained about that outcome, that's the risk that Russel and Mercedes took.
Pirelli would have been instructed to bring a hard tyre that was "hard enough" to make a 1-stop a possible strategic choice, whats the point of telling Pirelli that when 1-stoppers at Spa were going to be punished for using all the rubber on their set of tyres? May as well have mandated that everyone do a 2-stop race! And no one would support that argument.
The resurfacing of Spa and the unknown tyre wear because of the changeable weather from Quali to the race undoubtedly affected all drivers and teams, and its interesting that during the race Piastri diagnosed the secret of winning that Spa race as being in "clean air" or perhaps more accurately - being in clear air on the right tyres at the right time and his realization in the cool-down room that an even faster way around Spa that day was doing a 1 stop as Russell did, because the track rubbered in and developed over the race. Hamilton also made the point that everyone who was pitting during the race was often leaving a lot of rubber and tyre life behind In the pit stop garage.
Unlike other technical breaches, its interesting that other teams are pretty quiet about this and I think that's an admission that they recognize that Russsel maximized his tyre life and his strategy guys rolled the dice and they deserved the win. I think this whole fetish about car weights is a technological and competitive dead end brought about by not having refueling during the race and the reintroduction of refuelling would be worth a look as it would produce more variables in strategy and racing that would lead to more interesting races.
The crowds want to see motor car racing, not tyre preservation parades, and not weight management and fuel economy Sunday poker runs. They want to see teams maximize their performance and drivers use skill and judgment to maximize tyre life, track position and adjust to changing track conditions to be at the front when the chequered flag falls.
/end rant (And I'm not even a Mercedes or Russell fan)
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www.abc.net.au
