Rules, "rules", and the FIA

Spoilies ahead for the last race of the 2021 F1 season. You have been warned. Seriously, go watch it, now, I will wait.

    I have been an on again off again F1 fan for pretty much my entire adult life now and I have to say that the race today at Abu Dhabi and in fact this whole season has been the most exciting for me. But has it always been exciting for the right reasons? Throughout this season we have seen many races won or lost seemingly on the whims of the FIA Stewards. While I cannot cover every single ruling call over the last season, I at least wanted to give my rambling two cents as to why the two big rulings in this race were made and why these calls were difficult to make.

Incident 1 - Hamilton gaining advantage on turn 7.

    On the opening lap, after losing the lead off the start, Max braked way late going into turn 6 to try and gain the inside line. In doing so he pushed Lewis wide and off the track. Lewis took the runoff of turn 7 and sped away, clearing gaining quite a distance on Max. Of course Red Bull argued that Lewis gained that advantage off track and he should give the place up since they were “ahead” entering the corner, while of course Mercedes were pretty adamant the Max was at fault and too bad so sad. Thus it was the Stewards turn to make a decision, and this is where things get hard. Per the rules Max had the advantage going into the corner, thus “winning” the corner and thus Mercedes should have to give the place back. The problem is that Max clearly dive bombed Lewis and had no chance of ever making that corner. 

This is where Rules and “rules” clash. The FIA doesn’t want to set a precedent that dive bombing to gain an advantage on corner entry with zero plans of getting through the corner is ok. If they rule that ok once, every driver will start doing that and that is clearly dangerous driving behavior. They also don’t want to make a rule against dive bombing because what exactly does that entail. At the end of the day whether someone dive bombs a corner is subjective. They don’t want drivers worrying about penalties every time they make a move, that makes for a boring race and F1 has been struggling with how to make races more exciting for years now.

That is why I think the FIA let this one go, it punishes Max for making a boneheaded move, but doesn’t set a precinct that they will have to enforce in the future. It “lets them race” without really rewarding either Max or Lewis too much. If they had made Lewis give up the position it rewards bad driving, and there really isn’t a system in place right now to make Lewis slow down just a little bit to bring that gap back to where it was before the turns. It was a hard call but ultimately Max took a chance and it didn’t pay off.

Incident 2 - The safety car and back-markers

    What a difficult decision to make at the end here. When Nicholas Latifi crashed on lap 49 everyone thought that was it, the race was going to end under caution. I will argue that that is why the FIA did what they did. Every team should have known that the FIA was going to do everything in their power to not let the most exciting season of F1 end with such a fizzle. Usually after the track is cleared the lapped cars are allowed to go around the safety car and the next lap the safety car comes into the pits and racing resumes, but they didn’t have enough laps left to do that and have a racing finish. To let the race finish under green they would have to keep Max 5 cars back from Lewis and keep the lapped cars where they were and make Max fight his way through them on the last lap, nearly guaranteeing a win for Lewis. Originally this is what they were going to do, but at the last minute the FIA decided to let only the lapped cars between Max and Lewis pass the safety car right at the end of lap 53 and to also pit the safety car right after those cars passed. Since Max was now on fresh soft compound tires and Lewis on old hard tires, this clearly gave the advantage, and win, to Max. 

At the end of the day the FIA’s handling of this caution was going to be what decided the championship, or really it was the speed of the cleanup crew that decided it. If they had gotten Latifi’s car off the track sooner then the FIA wouldn’t have had to make a ruling on the lapped cars and the race would have ended as it did. Red Bull took the gamble of switching to soft compound tires under caution, and Mercedes took the gamble of staying out and hoping it would end under yellow, and it all came down to timing and rulings. 

Ultimately I think the FIA wanted an exciting finish, and they worked within the “rules” to make sure that would happen. Mercedes of course protested this decision but the FIA came back and explained how they were well within the rules to do as they did. (Mercedes have posted the FIA’s rulings to their twitter) Regardless of which way they called this they were going to be criticized and at the end of the day this is entertainment and there have not been this many eyeballs on the sport in a very long time so the FIA gave the people what they wanted, a race to the finish.

Some will of course argue that this is too much politics in racing, and I don’t necessarily disagree. Part of the fun of watching F1 over other racing though is the politics that goes along with it. True that these are the best drivers and cars in the world, but it is still a team sport, and political strategy has just as much to do with winning as driving fast. I think Red Bull knew this, and Mercedes missed that. 

What do you think, should the FIA have let the race finish under yellow? Left the lapped cars where they were and went back to racing? Or did they make the right call?