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Charlie Whiting explains decisions made during Japanese GP

14:15, 07 Oct 2018

byJake Williams-Smith

FIA race director Charlie Whiting has explained several decisions made by the race stewards during the Japanese Grand Prix. In an eventful race, multiple drivers picked up various punishments for a variety of infringements.

Speaking after the race, Whiting explained several of the notable clashes on track, including the contact between Max Verstappen and both Ferrari's in separate incidents.

“Seb tried to get up the inside, it was a reasonable move, got halfway alongside, Max turned in - a bit of a classic really,” Whiting explained.

“As you know stewards don’t normally give penalties unless they are sure one driver was wholly or predominantly to blame. Opinions will vary whether it was equal blame, but certainly no driver was predominantly to blame.

“The first one was quite clearly a penalty, because Max went off the track and rejoined the track unsafely,” Whiting explained referencing the Raikkonen clash.

“You’re required to rejoin safely and Kimi was there and he pushed him off the track. I think that was a fairly straightforward one for the stewards.”

He also explained the lack of a penalty that was forthcoming for Kevin Magnussen after the Haas driver appeared to aggressively block Charles Leclerc with a late move on the pit straight.

“If you analyse it very, very carefully, what you see is two cars coming down with Kevin not moving, and then Charles catches, catches, catches, he decides to go to the right, and at exactly the same time, on the video, one frame, there’s one frame difference, then Kevin moves.

“I think it’s impossible to say that Kevin blocked him, it was just he made the decision that he was going to go right, fractionally after Charles had. You had to look at it quite a few times and analyse it in little detail to see that, but I think that it’s just unfortunate, and that’s what the stewards felt.”