You're probably aware that I've been a bit of a fan of Romain Grosjean since he came into F1. I was actually pretty indifferent to him in GP2, although I was a big believer that he should get another crack at F1 and I've always thought he's quite good ever since he won the F3 Euro Series title back in 2007.
When it was announced that Grosjean would be banned for a race for causing the Spa crash I was pretty shocked. Looking back, I was probably a bit offended, maybe on his behalf - Grosjean is not a dirty driver. Considering a ban hasn't been handed out for nearly 20 years, I took the decision as one that was accusing Grosjean of being more dangerous than any other driver from the past 20 years.
This he is not. I for one love his attacking style. Look at Valencia - where he started by diving cleanly down the inside of Pastor Maldonado into the tight turn two to take second, and then made a stunning move on Lewis Hamilton for second before he was robbed of a strong result by a technical failure.
Those moves were clean and exciting. Everyone points out that he's been involved in lots of first lap incidents this season, but when you look at it most of them were racing incidents and not ones he was particularly at fault for - perhaps one or two were clumsy but none of them were what I would consider to be dangerous.
I don't know however what he thought he was playing at on Sunday. He should have been penalised for a needless and dangerous manoeuvre. However, while the accident that followed was amongst the worst we have seen in F1 in recent years, his original manoeuvre was not. He should not have been punished for the set of circumstances that nearly saw a driver hit in the head by a flying car or two.
Had that clash between Grosjean and Hamilton happened later in the race with nobody around them, it would only have been their races that were ended. Would the penalty have been as harsh? No.
So what's the message? That you're not allowed to move around at all at the start? There was no need for Grosjean to try and block Hamilton like he did, but he's not the first to do that. Without spending all night looking for video evidence, I'm fairly sure that big names like Alonso, Hamilton and Vettel (in fact, with Vettel I distinctly remember him trying to force Button off track in Japan last year) have been guilty of swerving across track to make blocking manoeuvres at the start before. Where were their bans, or even penalties? How is Grosjean supposed to know that moving around at the start is bad if the sport's biggest names have been allowed to get away with it?
Moving away from Grosjean's incident specifically, there has been a lot of comments that driving standards are poor in F1 and particularly in the lower categories. In F1, I don't think that driving standards are poor at all. Yes people do occasionally crash, yes they make mistakes. But I for one enjoy seeing drivers make mistakes. It shows they're human. It shows they're pushing the limits, that what they're trying to do isn't easy. And F1 would be very boring if nobody ever made any mistakes.
And to be honest I don't think I particularly mind seeing crashes either. Now don't get me wrong - I don't get any particular enjoyment from them either. I just don't have a desire to see crashes to be eliminated from racing.
But I'm now going to contradict myself, knowing how I reacted to Robert Cregan's crash in GP3 last weekend. The crash or the original impact didn't really make me flinch beyond normal. The shocking thing was catching glimpse of one of his wheels seemingly on to of his helmet. I got up and walked to the other end of the room - I didn't want to watch. Knowing what happened to Henry Surtees at Brands Hatch in 2009, I feared the worst. And so did a lot of others judging by the immediate reaction on Twitter.
Cregan's accident was a racing incident. There was some attempts on one YouTube clip to apportion blame at the feet of David Fumanelli, but he simply was not aware that there was a third car to the right of him and Alex Brundle, so he quite rightly moved right to open up the corner a bit thinking that Brundle would be able to go right as well. The decision was quite rightly taken not to punish anyone. Arguably they shouldn't have been going three-wide into Pouhon, but still, which driver can you punish? All three? Let's not get silly.
The belief that the solution to the issue of cars nearly decapitating Fernando Alonso is to ban drivers is flawed. Not only can big crashes happen without any contact between cars taking place - take Nigel Melker's accident - but improved driving standards won't prevent contact either. Not unless you're going to teach people not to race wheel-to-wheel and take those kind of risks, in which case I'm leaving the sport right now to go and watch a bit of bowls.
I will admit that there is a lack of driving standards in lower categories. But, at least in GP2, most of these poor standards are just, for want of a better description, shit drivers. Most of the silly accidents are caused by a Cecotto or a Crestani or a Gonzalez or a De Jong actually reaching the limit of their capabilities. These kind of drivers should never get to F1 and shouldn't really be in GP2 - but sadly that's what happens when the series organiser fails to control costs and drivers need in excess of 2 million bob for a season's racing. Anyway, that's a debate for another day.
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| Cecotto in his natural habitat - arriving at La Source much quicker than anyone else and about to assault the innocent Max Chilton (Photo: Alastair Staley/GP2 Media Service) |
Essentially, a lot of the bad driving that goes on is just that - drivers who are out of their depths and hopefully won't be troubling F1 any time soon. Unfortunately it does rub off on the more talented drivers, who probably try and push their luck a bit. I think some bans probably are in order here though. It might make the less-capable drivers think twice about whether they should even be racing at that level, and remind the better drivers that that kind of thing isn't acceptable.
Going back to the Grosjean incident, and there are a couple of things I want clearing up. If Grosjean can be banned for what he did, I would expect more F1 drivers to be banned in the near future. But will that happen?
I'm generally in favour of the concept of banning drivers, particularly if you compare it to football or other sports where athletes can be forced to miss a contest because of misconduct on the field of play. Had the decision been taken before a season that sanctions were going to become tougher and that drivers could be banned for that kind of incident, I'd be fine with it. We'd know where we stand. But it appears that this has not been a move that has been widely-agreed. It just seems to be a decision taken by the four stewards in charge at Spa. Will the stewards at Monza follow the same guidlines? And Singapore and Suzuka and every remaining venue? I can't see it happening. I don't see how those four stewards can make a fundamental change like that. Surely it needs to go past Charlie Whiting or some other people at the FIA? Surely it needs to be put down in writing?
If banning is going to become regular, which I have no problem with, then I have no problem with Grosjean being banned. My problem is if this is going to be a bit of a one-off, because that would just be massively unfair on Grosjean. It would just be another case of massively inconsistent stewarding. Sort it out, FIA.
One line of the stewards decision also made for concerning reading.
"It eliminated leading championship contenders from the race."
I don't think anyone would disagree that this is just stupid, and has no irrelevance. So no need to any more. But seriously?... (To be honest, I kind of enjoyed seeing leading contenders out of the race. Allowed guys like the Force Indias and Toro Rossos to mix it. And Jenson to win easily.)
I'm going to call another stewarding/FIA decision into question now. After the race, Grosjean said he thought he was ahead of Hamilton. Now, the fact remains that he didn't need to be blocking Hamilton and you could call Grosjean a total idiot for not realising that he wasn't ahead of Hamilton. But all it shows to me is the idiocy of the rule introduced earlier in the year about defending.
It goes something along the lines of you're allowed to use the full width of the track to defend so long as no part of the car behind is alongside you in any way.
Grosjean isn't the first driver to misjduge this. It must be extremely difficult to try and judge whether or not the car behind is alongside your back wheel when you're travelling at a gazillion miles an hour, have tiny little wing mirrors that show you nothing other than your own rear wing and you're looking straight ahead of you to make sure you don't hit anything.
So the rule is a bit silly. It's made defending drivers think they can get away with dangerous moves as long as they're ahead and it's made those attacking think they're allowed to stick their nose alongside a driver whatever the situation.
Take this incident involving James Calado and Luiz Razia at the start of the GP2 sprint race at Spa. The incident was investigated after the race and no action was taken. It seems as though Calado might be to blame, but clearly he had a defence. Shortly before the kink, he can be seen looking in his mirrors, and at this point Razia is evidently behind. He therefore decides to take the racing line and move from right to left. Unfortunately as he does this, Razia begins to pull alongside and ends up on the grass and having a crash that could have had far worse consequences than it did.
Going by this new rule, you could say Calado was at fault as Razia seemed to be alongside. But it depends when you decide that Calado started the move. Clearly he was happy that when he looked in his mirrors before the kink that he was safe to make that manoeuvre. And that's probably how he escaped punishment, because it looks as though Calado had started the move by the time Razia was alongside. To be fair, he also wasn't deviating from the racing line. So in fact you could say it was a dangerous move from Razia as he should have made allowances for the fact that Calado could choose to take the racing line. But with the new rule, it places more responsibility on the leading driver and therefore the one behind can essentially place their car where they like.
I also wonder if a specific guideline needs to be put in place for that kink on the Kemmel Straight, because I've seen similar crashes at the same point in F2 and Porsche Supercup this year. Something along the lines of the leading driver being able to take the racing line and the driver behind having to be a bit more patient. And not try and pull alongside at that point.
After talking about safety of the cockpit area in single-seaters earlier on, I want to say that any argument against closed cockpits along the lines of 'it isn't an F1 car anymore' is rubbish, to me at least. I saw this picture on Twitter earlier and to me that looks like nothing other than an F1 car. I don't think having the head exposed the way it is is really a necessary risk to be taking. It's still a racing car, it's still seats one person, it still has open wheels and wings and goes fast. What more do you really need?
There are obviously concerns about drivers maybe being trapped in the case of an accident and although I'm sure there's got to be a way around that, I trust that the people in the know will properly evaluate everything before making any changes.
Finally, I'm glad that Jerome D'Ambrosio has been given the nod to replace Grosjean at Monza. Any other move would have been stupid. I must have forgotten that he tested the E20 in Mugello, but even without that he was the most qualified, given he's been working with the team since the start of the year. Also, Lopez and Boullier have both invested a lot of time and money in him before. I don't really rate him, but he's good enough to be a reserve driver and therefore good enough to stand-in for just one race.
That just about concludes my Belgian waffle. This piece was inspired by Will Buxton's pretty good piece here, which makes a lot of good points that I hadn't even thought about and brought me around to the idea of bans, and also by all the stuff I've seen on Twitter that I've other agreed with or been enraged by.
As for Grosjean, the last two drivers banned were Mika Hakkinen and Michael Schumacher - and they turned out alright.
