Both Mercedes and Red Bull did the “right” thing for the circumstances.
The race director went off half cocked. If he let all the cars unlap themselves the race would finish under red flag. If he had just legitimately done the restart with the 4 lapped cars in place they would all have dived out of the way when blue flagged and Verstappen would probably have still won and nobody would have had anything to complain about.
The race director is under a lot of pressure and presumably had another person observing, like Charlie Whiting did in Herbie Blash.
They fucked up big time.
The problem is the last race always takes on absurd importance both because the scores for all the other races are known and it is the last race of the season so people have weeks to fester about it.
Max had bad luck at other races, with the tyre blowout in Baku stands out but that tends to get forgotten.
It is like the tyre failure Mansell had in Adelaide 1986 people festered for ages after that but if the season had been reversed everybody would have forgotten about it by mid season and the last race would have been Brazil where he went off on the first lap.
All the races count equally in actuality.
What we need is a race direction system which works as well as it did with Charlie and Roland before him, which probably means not having radio contact with teams’ sporting directors and definitely not having radio broadcast.
Definitely this. While it’s interesting to hear the conversations, it’s too easy for casuals to get carried away with it.
Team radio is OK but the added pressure on the Race Director is unnecessary. Pay for it by all means, if you want it, but the average punter doesn’t need it.
I think the teams badgering the race director like that is something that should absolutely be outlawed. Sure, there needs to be a channel to communicate, but not that directly and not in public.
Perfectly entitled to, but extremely unlikely to, as historically all drivers have been aware of the convention that in the last race, they let the drivers fighting for the championship, fight for the championship, without them getting in the way.