Piastri deserved British Grand Prix win

Auto Action’s regular columnist Chris Lambden has some very firm views on the penalty that cost Oscar Piastri the British Grand Prix and how it came about …

Oscar Piastri drove a perfect race on Sunday and should have accepted the winner’s trophy and a 22-point lead in the championship.

Four years ago, a Steward’s decision to ensure a race didn’t finish under Safety Car is deemed – by British motorsport fans in particular – to have cost Lewis Hamilton the World Championship. It’s been a sore on the sport ever since – and the Poms won’t ever believe that Lewis wasn’t robbed of the 2021 title.

Well, it’s happened again. This time it benefited a Brit – Lando Norris – and the crowd went mad … well, at Silverstone at least.

This time, three almost anonymous Stewards – Nish Shetty, Mathieu Remmerie and Richard Norbury, along with ex-driver Vitantonio Liuzzi (I mention them because I’m sure that you have no idea who the three are) made what can only be described as a ‘subjective’ decision about Piastri’s slowing down behind the departing Safety Car and penalised him a race-costing and devastating 10 seconds.

Braked too heavily they said (59psi brake pressure, they said).

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before – recently. Three weeks ago in fact, when George Russell went unpenalised (by Gerd Enser, Matthew Selley, Natalie Corsmit and ex-driver Enrique Bernoldi – a totally different Stewarding line-up) for exactly the same thing. In this case the brake pressure was said to be around 30psi.

Normal heavy-braking pressure in F1 cars is around 130psi. 59psi? – hardly ‘heavy’.

Interestingly, the same car/driver was second in the queue on both occasions – and passed the lead car briefly when the leader braked. That’d be Max – you know, the guy who likes to intimidate his opposition and occasionally drives into them … But that’s another story.

There are two obvious takes from this unacceptable ruling.

Firstly – they’ve been talking about full-time, therefore consistent same-at-every-race, Stewards for ages. But it hasn’t happened. With the millions of bucks, and championships, at stake, that’s a ‘fail’ under FIA President Ben Sulayem’s watch.

Secondly, and slightly more controversially, there’s simply far too much ‘white-shirt’ (polite word for officialdom) interference in races these days – especially F1.

We’re dealing with the top 20 drivers in the world (well, mostly).

They can’t deal with a bit of water – in the highest-tech cars ever, on race-tracks way, way safer than ever? Yeah right.

It got a bit wet on Sunday. No one had crashed. The 20 were doing their job. Yes, it was tricky, but … best cars, best tyres, best drivers …

Safety Car! Let’s bunch them all up, kill 15 minutes driving around, then let them all go again in a cloud of nose-to-tail, no-one-can-see-anything, spray.

Great. A crash. Who’d have thought!

It’s called risk management – the catchy cover-all phrase which allows well-meaning bureaucrats and officials to ‘save us from ourselves’. In motorsport, F1 especially, it’s become overdone.

So then, on to the deciding re-start. This time, unlike Canada, without a protest from anyone to kick it off, our Stewarding foursome decided that 59psi (compared to 130) was just too much.

In a sport awash with complex rules and regs, that was something of a subjective decision, made in rather a hurry.

And it cost a driver who had driven the perfect race, a British Grand Prix victory. Lando didn’t win it – he was gifted it.

I admire Oscar for a lot of things – but his post-race composure, when he must have been burning inside, was … impressive.

S2025 now joins Abu Dhabi 2021 in the F1 Hall of Shame, though the Poms may not think so!

Photo by Steven Tee/LAT Images

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