Motorsport

That felt all very 2021. Shambles. I'll keep banging this drum but it's impossible to race verstappen

Really think McLaren should appeal. Max left the track and gained an advantage (faster exit speed) so he should also get a 5 second penalty.

It's not like Lando forced him off.

I look forward to the day another driver does what Hamilton did to Max. Show no mercy, play him at his own game, invite contact.

Also really disappointed in Brundle today. As if he'd have been cool with that when he was racing. He'd be spitting.

Would also like to see T1, lap 1 replay as pretty sure Max left the track in that move too and wasn't ahead at the apex. Although he was still Max driving Max's car at that stage so I guess no penalty is consistent.

You can't do that against someone with the Championship lead, and anyway, we don't want it to be lowest common denominator. One of the reasons I like Lando is that he's pretty sporting.

It's absurd but consistent. Apparently the stewards aren't interested in using brake traces or common sense to judge intent, therefore:

A) the driver being legitimately overtaken on the outside can just not slow sufficiently to make the corner in order to ensure they are ahead at the apex as that's all that matters. Moan that they were overtaken off track.(Norris on Max)

B) the driver being legitimately overtaken on the inside can just not slow sufficiently to make the corner to ensure the overtaking car isn't substantially alongside at the apex as that's all that matters. Moan that they were forced off.(Russell on Bottas)

In both cases the overtaker got penalised 5s.

If there's no obligation to keep the car on track when defending we're done here. No more overtaking without massive DRS over speed that gets you fully ahead before the corner.

I can't believe we're being gaslit by the F1 industry to believe this is normal.

This is the crux of it. I've watched the replay over and over and it seems Max's entire car was over the white line, as well as Lando's... and this is if you ignore the argument that Max forced Lando off.

Going into the corner, Lando could have cut across Max early and claimed the apex, but he didn't risk it and left Max a car's width... then once again Max deployed the Verstappen manoeuvre, with no attempt to take the corner.

I know I'm a broken record but what bothers me most is the bad example this sets. Motorsport is being diminished.

F1 is what kids emulate. It should be where the highest racing standards are upheld. There should be penalties for stepping out of line and results should be changed if necessary. Faced with constantly penalising Max or changing the norms to be more permissive they went for the latter. It's an abdication if responsibility.

The stewards' responses to Max's moves are confusing a generation on the absolute fundamentals of the racing conduct. Worse it's at a time where lots of new people are coming to the sport.

You only have to look at some of the social media responses to see how clueless a lot of recent F1 fans are about wheel to wheel etiquette.

I don't even really blame Max at this point. Why should he change if he's being enabled?

My two cents, for what little they’re worth, is that you can gnash your teeth at Verstappen all you want, but he’s just doing what he’s allowed to do in the current rules. He’s about as competitive as they come and so he will do whatever he can get away with.

I think McLaren were a bit naive not to just get Lando to let him squeeze back through and then retake him again, as they had the pace.

If the rules are going to stay a mess, then it just increases the need to replace run-offs with gravel traps or grass though. These incidents would be far less common if there were actual implications for overshooting a corner.

That's what I was thinking, he should have just let him through with a tiny gap and gone for it again.  McLaren have cumulatively thrown this away this season.

Max is the original cause, patient zero if you will, but the FIA is responsible for not curing him 6 years ago and allowing his 'novel' approach to infect the sport. At this point I firmly blame them not him.

I also think McLaren did the correct thing. I wasn't joking yesterday when I said Lando should just pass him offtrack and take the 5s as it was so obvious what Max was going to do, because it's what he always does.

With that in mind, there was no way Lando could ever pass without Max making a mistake, as Lando simply didn't have enough of a top speed advantage to get fully past before the braking zone (i.e. the only way to prevent that 'defence'). At least by doing what he did he highlighted the issue, and got the same result he'd have got anyway. Just a shame he couldn't do that move slightly earlier but he didn't quite have enough tyre offset to get to him sooner.

Gravel traps won't help with what Max did, though it would prevent the Bottas Russell one (so I'd be in favour).  This one should be talked about more as it was just as stupid.

The only sensible solution is to refine these rules so that they actually correspond with racing ethics of the past 50 years. i.e. the defending driver has to stay on the track themselves, and be forced to cede the place if they fail to (this instruction was never necessary before because no one was in the habit of driving clean off the track in defence before).

If Max had kept the car on the track, I wouldn't actually have had any complaint about the line he took to that point. We'll never know but I suspect if he'd slowed enough to make the corner, Lando may have been ahead at the apex and therefore entitled to a cars width on exit. Or to put it another way: normal fair racing.

Well they changed the rules to suit Max so it's completely on the fia and f1.

I don't have the strength for it again. 2021 was infuriating and in some ways was a bit of a "jump the shark" moment.

We need a Piastri or Hamilton to take it to max. I don't think lando or leclec have the mentality or ability to beat max.

Agreed. Everyone else starts in a 2 horse race whereas Max is highly likely to be the only out and out number 1 unless an Aston Martin is suddenly amazing. The only hope is that the RB just isn't there performance wise for long enough. There's a chance though as he probably doesn't win this years drivers title without getting away from everyone in the first 3 months.

I'm not sure Stroll wins the WDC even if the Aston was a Redbull 2023 style rocketship. It would need unprecedented performance against the rest of the field, as well as Latifi.