A safety car is always going to affect the race somehow. Someone can have a 50 second lead and if the safety car picks up the leader and is out for a couple of laps he will lose it. Had Lewis gone marginally faster he would have been ahead of the safety car and the advantage he gained would have been OK. I just can’t understand how Alonso was able to remain so angry for the whole race about one minor incident. It really is pathetic that he can’t just let it go after he has told the team to protest. If I was Ferrari and paying him all that money I would expect him to spend his Sundays getting his car in the best condition he could rather than trying to get Lewis Hamilton or anyone else into a worse position. It is not as if he would have done anything different.

I really don’t see why it took race control so long to reach a decision as it was crystal clear from the overhead camera and they have a team of people in front of a video wall showing all the feeds. I also don’t understand why they waited till after the race to penalise those who were speeding during the safety car period then invented a 5 second penalty that does not appear in the list of available penalties. All of them should have been give drive throughs during the race. Like the Hamilton penalty these should have been announced before the race went green.

Imagine the grief if the transponders weren’t mounted in a uniform location on the F1 cars…

@Stuart: The reason why it took so long was that the margin was so small that it could only be confirmed after a triple check.

From F1 Fanatic

“Bear in mind that there was probably less than a car’s length in it between Lewis and the safety car. Also, there was no back-up timing loop at that point, so Whiting wanted to see footage of the incident. This, initially, was from an angle that was not conclusive and so there was a delay while aerial footage was sought. This confirmed that Hamilton appeared to be guilty but that it was indeed a close call. There was more to check. Depending on where the timing transponders are placed on a car – for instance if one was at the back and the other at the front, you can have a situation where one car that appears to be ahead of another one actually records the same time. So, when it’s that tight, installation positions have to be checked, times and distances noted and calculations made.”

You sound a tad bitter

I don’t really follow football, so it all went over my head. As a rugby fan I’m well acquainted with the travails of the national side since their world cup win in 2003, not to mention the ups and downs of Bath…

@antoine

Ah yes, they’re almost always unmarked plod.

You don’t run red lights, you do not attempt to pass the ambulance when the sirens are on…

…and you never, ever overtake a Skoda Octavia vRS on the motorway…

Perhaps it’s a similar kind of grief over the Abruzzi’s miserable exit that has Luca making such obnoxious statements like what he said today: “That is a very serious and unacceptable event that creates dangerous precedents, throwing a shadow over the credibility of Formula 1.”

Oh, the hypocrisy! Memories of the 2006 season, of Alonso’s grid penalty for “blocking” Felipe Massa during qualifying at Monza (Was that Monza?) come flooding back, followed by a wave of other dubious-at-best rulings that have favored Ferrari over the years throwing more than just a shadow of credibility on his precious sport….

I suppose it’s about time we had something moderately juicy happen off the track. I was just thinking over the weekend that it’s been some seven weeks since your “Slow news year” post of May 10, and not much had happened since.

What I can’t understand is why Lewis passed the Safety Car in the first place. Seriously, what the hell was he thinking? It was running the red light in the pitlane at Montreal in 2008. Sheesh! These are basic motoring fundamentals that go beyond racing. You don’t run red lights, you do not attempt to pass the ambulance when the sirens are on…

Going back to closing the pit lane (well nobody can complain about running out of fuel any more can they?) would have solved a lot of Ferrari’s problem and then only rearrangement of the SC train by either slowing Vettel/Hamilton or letting everyone else through would be required.