Theft at Spa
I tend to recoil from conspiracy theories and urban myths. They usually tend to be a little too convenient or far-fetched to be believable. The truth, however, humdrum, usually makes more sense. There has long been a belief among the non-Ferrari supporting world that the FIA was part of team-Ferrari. This was born out by the curious fact that if ever there has been a rule capable of being interpreted in more than one way, the FIA have invariably interpreted it in the manner most favourable to Ferrari.
A particularly blatant example of this was seen at the Malaysian Grand Prix in 1999. The Ferraris were nearly a whole lap ahead of everybody else but were disqualified for cheating. The team had allegedly fitted illegal barge boards – an aerodynamic device – which gave them an unfair advantage over every other team. The race stewards disqualified both Michael Schumacher and Eddie Irvine but team Ferrari chose to appeal to the FIA in Paris. The FIA chose to exonerate the drivers but punish the team. The drivers’ points were reinstated because they themselves were not to blame for the incident. This seemed very odd and caused a massive furore. Still, the FIA remained unrepentant. I bit my lip then and shrugged the affair off as “one of these things”. I cannot do this any more after the travesty of a decision we saw yesterday.
Spa tends to produce great races - and yesterday’s was no exception – because of the unpredictability of the weather up in the Ardennes where the circuit is located. Lewis Hamilton, after qualifying superbly on pole, made an error on the second lap and found himself sitting behind Kimi Raikkonen for the bulk of the race With three laps to go to the chequered flag, the heavens opened. Hamilton, in his element in such conditions, managed to get himself up to the backside of Raikkonen and attempted an overtaking manoeuvre. Raikkonen went defensive and – unfairly in my view – squeezed out Hamilton. So much so that Hamilton was forced off the circuit and he unwittingly cut across the chicane to get ahead of Raikkonen. Had he remained in first position he would have been guilty of gaining an unfair advantage. Instead, Hamilton did as he was required to do by the rules and gave the place back to Raikkonen. He then lunged after the Ferrari and overtook Raikkonen fairly and squarely. Raikkonen then proceeded to spin his Ferrari off the circuit and into a concrete wall.
This was not what the stewards thought of the incident. Not even scarcely. Hours after celebrating a brilliant win, Hamilton was deemed to have gained an unfair advantage by “taking a short cut”. Were the stewards watching a different race or what? Fortunately for them they had a Ferrari behind Hamilton driven by his Brazilian nemesis, Felipe Massa. So determined were the stewards to assist Ferrari that, once they saw the world champion wreck his car against a wall, they chose to award the victory to a chap who had qualified poorly, overtaken nobody throughout the race and driven what one can only charitably call a lacklustre race. I mean to say, if you are going to take the piss do it with a bit of subtlety for pity’s sake. Felipe Massa did not win the Belgian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton did. This is beyond a joke.
If you recall the European Grand Prix in Valencia, Ferrari released Felipe Massa from the pits dangerously into the path of another car. Massa himself was not penalised (and kept his full allocation of winner’s points) but the team was fined. In the GP2 race on Saturday, Bruno Senna did exactly the same thing and was awarded a drive-through penalty which destroyed his race. Where is the consistency?
Lewis Hamilton is, therefore, fighting Ferrari and the FIA for the world championship. Charming. Absobloodylutely charming! I am seething as I write this.
Did someone say that Raikkonen was the new master of Spa? Well, the two previous “owners” of the circuit, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, were geniuses in the wet. A few drops of rain and the Finnish ice man is guaranteed to fall to pieces.
All is not lost. Two points separate Hamilton and Massa. But who is now more fired up?
Perhaps there is some poetic element to this fiasco. The events did take place in Belgium after all. After the horror of the Napoleonic wars, Britain and France decided they needed a new neutral zone in Western Europe. They cobbled together a country from bits of Netherlands to its north and bits of France and installed a monarch related to senior European royalty like Queen Victoria. Thus was born the tiny lowland kingdom of Belgium in 1831. It didn’t really seem to stand for an awful lot or do anything at all until the son of the first Belgian king came on the scene. Leopold II was a right bastard. Had it not been for his exploits, Belgium would probably have disappeared into obscurity but King Leopold II was having none of it. Instead he claimed for himself an enormous chunk of territory in central Africa and called it the Congo Free State. He then proceeded to pillage the country on a more massive scale than has ever been seen anywhere else on the continent. The murder, savagery and senseless violence meted out on the hapless slaves who had the misery to labour on King Leopold’s rubber plantations will forever remain a grisly reminder of the barbarity of the European in Africa.
Belgium’s reputation has never fully recovered from this ghastly period. Not a lot else springs to memory when one thinks of Belgium’s contribution to the world: the saxophone, frites, Tintin and my favourite surrealist artist, Rene Magritte. In more recent times, however, Belgium’s capital, Brussels, has distinguished itself by being the home of the headquarters of both the European Union and NATO. From my blinkered perspective Belgium is an incredibly important country. For it is the home of quite easily the best motor racing circuit in Europe: Spa-Francorchamps. Famous for its impossible to predict weather and death defying corners, Spa is a true driver’s circuit. Everybody used to love Spa. Now it stands as another monument to theft.
I am not quite sure what I will remember Spa most for after yesterday.
Gitau
8 September 2008
A particularly blatant example of this was seen at the Malaysian Grand Prix in 1999. The Ferraris were nearly a whole lap ahead of everybody else but were disqualified for cheating. The team had allegedly fitted illegal barge boards – an aerodynamic device – which gave them an unfair advantage over every other team. The race stewards disqualified both Michael Schumacher and Eddie Irvine but team Ferrari chose to appeal to the FIA in Paris. The FIA chose to exonerate the drivers but punish the team. The drivers’ points were reinstated because they themselves were not to blame for the incident. This seemed very odd and caused a massive furore. Still, the FIA remained unrepentant. I bit my lip then and shrugged the affair off as “one of these things”. I cannot do this any more after the travesty of a decision we saw yesterday.
Spa tends to produce great races - and yesterday’s was no exception – because of the unpredictability of the weather up in the Ardennes where the circuit is located. Lewis Hamilton, after qualifying superbly on pole, made an error on the second lap and found himself sitting behind Kimi Raikkonen for the bulk of the race With three laps to go to the chequered flag, the heavens opened. Hamilton, in his element in such conditions, managed to get himself up to the backside of Raikkonen and attempted an overtaking manoeuvre. Raikkonen went defensive and – unfairly in my view – squeezed out Hamilton. So much so that Hamilton was forced off the circuit and he unwittingly cut across the chicane to get ahead of Raikkonen. Had he remained in first position he would have been guilty of gaining an unfair advantage. Instead, Hamilton did as he was required to do by the rules and gave the place back to Raikkonen. He then lunged after the Ferrari and overtook Raikkonen fairly and squarely. Raikkonen then proceeded to spin his Ferrari off the circuit and into a concrete wall.
This was not what the stewards thought of the incident. Not even scarcely. Hours after celebrating a brilliant win, Hamilton was deemed to have gained an unfair advantage by “taking a short cut”. Were the stewards watching a different race or what? Fortunately for them they had a Ferrari behind Hamilton driven by his Brazilian nemesis, Felipe Massa. So determined were the stewards to assist Ferrari that, once they saw the world champion wreck his car against a wall, they chose to award the victory to a chap who had qualified poorly, overtaken nobody throughout the race and driven what one can only charitably call a lacklustre race. I mean to say, if you are going to take the piss do it with a bit of subtlety for pity’s sake. Felipe Massa did not win the Belgian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton did. This is beyond a joke.
If you recall the European Grand Prix in Valencia, Ferrari released Felipe Massa from the pits dangerously into the path of another car. Massa himself was not penalised (and kept his full allocation of winner’s points) but the team was fined. In the GP2 race on Saturday, Bruno Senna did exactly the same thing and was awarded a drive-through penalty which destroyed his race. Where is the consistency?
Lewis Hamilton is, therefore, fighting Ferrari and the FIA for the world championship. Charming. Absobloodylutely charming! I am seething as I write this.
Did someone say that Raikkonen was the new master of Spa? Well, the two previous “owners” of the circuit, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, were geniuses in the wet. A few drops of rain and the Finnish ice man is guaranteed to fall to pieces.
All is not lost. Two points separate Hamilton and Massa. But who is now more fired up?
Perhaps there is some poetic element to this fiasco. The events did take place in Belgium after all. After the horror of the Napoleonic wars, Britain and France decided they needed a new neutral zone in Western Europe. They cobbled together a country from bits of Netherlands to its north and bits of France and installed a monarch related to senior European royalty like Queen Victoria. Thus was born the tiny lowland kingdom of Belgium in 1831. It didn’t really seem to stand for an awful lot or do anything at all until the son of the first Belgian king came on the scene. Leopold II was a right bastard. Had it not been for his exploits, Belgium would probably have disappeared into obscurity but King Leopold II was having none of it. Instead he claimed for himself an enormous chunk of territory in central Africa and called it the Congo Free State. He then proceeded to pillage the country on a more massive scale than has ever been seen anywhere else on the continent. The murder, savagery and senseless violence meted out on the hapless slaves who had the misery to labour on King Leopold’s rubber plantations will forever remain a grisly reminder of the barbarity of the European in Africa.
Belgium’s reputation has never fully recovered from this ghastly period. Not a lot else springs to memory when one thinks of Belgium’s contribution to the world: the saxophone, frites, Tintin and my favourite surrealist artist, Rene Magritte. In more recent times, however, Belgium’s capital, Brussels, has distinguished itself by being the home of the headquarters of both the European Union and NATO. From my blinkered perspective Belgium is an incredibly important country. For it is the home of quite easily the best motor racing circuit in Europe: Spa-Francorchamps. Famous for its impossible to predict weather and death defying corners, Spa is a true driver’s circuit. Everybody used to love Spa. Now it stands as another monument to theft.
I am not quite sure what I will remember Spa most for after yesterday.
Gitau
8 September 2008
posted by Gitau at 3:04 pm
1 Comments:
I have to agree with you on this DG, I think the FIA has been cut enough slack to hang itself several times over. Every time McClaren has a misstep, the FIA thwacks them with the hammer of Thor, but it appears the boys in red can do no wrong. If this asinine decision ends up having a bearing on where the title ends up, there has to be some sort of reaction. McClaren may not have much leverage, but thought needs to be given as to how to make the FIA listen. This surely cannot continue unchecked...
Post a Comment
<< Home