I did a quick search in this thread and to my surprise couldn't find too much discussion about the Safety Car.
Ultimately the big losers of this SC were
- Leclerc who lost three positions from what would most likely have been a win, depending on what
- Lewis could have done against either of the Ferraris, but he lost the chance to bring the fight to them with his tyre offset when he was massively gaining on Sainz prior to it being called
- Vettel who lost two positions and would safely have been P7 with decent gaps front and back
- Norris who swapped places with Alonso
- potentially Ricciardo who had way fresher tyres than STR and LAT and was gaining on them in big steps
The winners were
- Perez, who was more than one pit stop behind the front runners with still one stop to do which would have put him somewhere close to or behind Norris and Alonso, realistic that he would have overtaken both either way so he gained two positions
- Sainz who got a shot at winning his first race and took it
- Alonso who swapped with Norris and even got close to the frontrunners for a few moments
but ultimately the biggest winner was Verstappen, not only because instead of having to fight off Mick for 14 laps and potentially losing that position to finish 9th he could gain one position for 7th but also because instead of losing 23 points to Leclerc he only lost 6 - this however did partially make up for him picking up the damage in the race though and all things considered one could argue that it was a 13 point net gain for Charles anyways.
The decision to call the SC after yellows were shown only took them 10 odd seconds which was surprisingly quick, they seemingly did not even consider the VSC.
I always thought the whole idea of the VSC was to allow the marshalls to remove a car safely when no recovery vehicle is required, this was the case here, as the car being pushed was shown on the feed.
The mere fact that the race direction did not wait until the cars were all lined up behind the SC implies that they thought it was safe enough to do so under conditions which were no different to a VSC, as, to my knowledge, the SC and VSC delta times on the dash are the same, so with that in mind i looked at a full race replay and some footage from the live timing app.
Ocon stopped his car here
And was brought here
Those were the positions when he stopped the car
When the SC was called
So Perez and Tsunoda were just about to get past the scene and technically did so under VSC conditions, the same was true for Norris, Alonso, Vettel, Verstappen, Schumacher, Magnussen, Stroll and Latifi.
Clearer image with those cars marked
Leclerc was the first to be behind the SC, the others then pitted.
Leclerc behind the SC coming up to Copse, hard to tell whether Sainz, Hamilton and Ricciardo were already stacked up and just leaving large gaps or if they were still closing on the SC.
This is how it looks like with them stacked behind the SC, so it's probably the latter.
I would argue that it's just the two Ferraris which actually passed Ocon's car behind the SC.
HAM, RIC, PER, TSU, NOR, ALO then definitely went past under VSC conditions depending on where they were when the car was already gone potentially also VER, MSC, MAG, LAT and STR.
The second screenshot in this post was roughly the moment where Leclerc then finished lap 40, so the next time they went past Copse the car was already gone.
The recovery took three minutes at most from what i could see in the footage.
So in summary: The call for a full SC (a decision which had a big impact on the race result and potentially the championships) was completely unnecessary as all cars apart from two went past the marshalls who were pushing the car under conditions identical to a VSC - i really do not understand why they did not call a VSC first to have the marshalls check whether they could engage neutral or whether they'd have to call a full SC the get out a recovery vehicle.
Why they made the call? It's anyone's guess but Liberty surely was happy with the late drama and action.
