This. It was the way that it was won that made it questionable, Perez was clearly holding HAM up and the Team were telling him to do that in order for Max to win [0] which are just team orders in the end.
0: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.2021-abu-dhabi-gran...
The chaos that happened after Latifi's crash is what needs reform.
I grew up watching F1 in the 80s, and I don't recall EVER seeing a safety car. They either red-flagged the race and had a restart, Or they had sector based cautions.
I'd like to see a return to that style of race management. For added safety, the could using the same technology used to control DRS to enforce a speed-limiter in yellow sectors.
If you look for races in the 70s and early 80s you can see photographers on the grass at the inside of the curves.
And the invasions at Monza when the cars were going back to the pits after the end of the race. This is one of the last ones
Yeesh.
I take nothing away from Adrian Newey, he designs fast well balanced cars; nor do I take anything away from Max Verstappen, he is a phenomenal driver, it was just a poor decision by the F1 race director.
I think Newey didn’t have the engine to match his aero designs for the Mercedes dominated years. Mercedes won on having the best engine and a chassis designed to maximize that advantage and no team really had an answer to that until their engine tech caught up a bit.
Micheal Masi absolutely annihilated any chance of an Aussie V8 Supercars racing director from ever getting that job again. He split the hair just right to make for a thrilling end to an otherwise boring race, but at the tyrannical expense of pissing everybody off and killing his reputation stone dead.
I would have thought the way the race director restarted the race after Latifi's spin a few laps before the end, in a way that predetermined the race outcome, was what you were referring to. There was always going to be someone pissed off about that situation, although Masi went pretty far in a strange direction and managed to piss off the maximum amount of people. If he'd red flagged it immediately, that would have given a free set of new tires to everyone and blatantly handed the race to Hamilton instead of Verstappen.
And were illegal not too long ago, remember the Fernando is faster than you[0] scandal? Yeah, that was about the time I think I just couldn't be bothered with F1 anymore and just watched WRC instead. Honestly, F1 has always been a huge advertisement, but things like this is what makes it a mockery.
MotoGP also has team orders but the racing really is way better; I used to dislike it, but the racing has been so close and it's just a uch better spectacle without all the nonsensical pretense and pageantry that F1 has become bloated with.
I actually appreciate that team orders are no longer illegal in F1. When it was illegal the teams did it anyway, but in a way that was like cheating at blackjack or something. At least everyone understands what's happening now, and there is less hypocrisy.
I appreciate Indycar as an alternative to F1, but I recognize that they're about as bad at publicity as they can possibly be.
It's similar to cycling, every cycling team in the tour the france has a captain, the role of every cyclist in the team is to ensure the captain wins the tour. If every cyclist starts to compete just for themselves, teams would have very little chance of winning the tour.
hahah, oh my. Never change, HN.
Mercedes should've had Bottas further up if they wanted to counter.
The only way that he would have been infront of them on the track was if he was being lapped.