Renault on fire after dubious penalty (with movie)
Yet again it appears as if the FIA is supporting Ferrari on a difficult decision after Fernando Alonso was put back in 10th place for the Monza starting grid. Alonso was supposedly a hindrance to Massa in his qualifying lap, but it may have been just the opposite. While Fernando doesn't consider F1 a sport anymore, Renault technical direct Pat Symonds is furious at the FIA commitee.
With only 4 GP's to go this season and with a tight battle going on between Alonso and Schumacher for the championship, at looks like Schumacher is in the right car to win it. Not simply because it is faster, but more importantly because Formula One's ruling body, the FIA seems to give the advantage to the Ferrari team.
What happened yesterday was not a first incident during this year, as only 2 Grand Prix' ago, Renault saw its mass dampers disallowed by the same FIA. As of the Brazilian GP of 2005, the FIA had looked into the design of that damper and found it legal for use by Renault. Somehow though, with Schumacher becoming a possible world champion again, the dampers were deemed illegal in the middle of a running F1 season, effectively slowing Renault down in favour of Ferrari who, at this time, are second in the constructors' championship.
Obviously Pat Symonds, technical director at Renault is furious about the penalty and also believes Ferrari is allowed a lot more than any other team currently in F1.
"I don't understand the penalty, because we don't feel we impeded him," Symonds said. "This is a circuit where we are always trying to get a tow - especially in qualifying. Massa was 100 metres behind Alonso, so he got a nice tow, and I don't see it as a hindrance.
"I looked at Ferrari's telemetry, and [Massa] gained time on the back straight and was quicker into Parabolica than before. He lifted in the middle of the corner. To me, it looked like a mistake but he claimed he was losing downforce."
Furthermore, Symonds also slammed the tons of penalties that were handed out during qualifying this year. He stated that before 2003 everyone was complaining about traffic during qualifying but the FIA did not throw with penalties. Traffic at the time was considered a part of racing. He went on by saying that he honoustly cannot agree with a visible lack of consistency with penalties handed out during qualifying as well as in races.
"It's difficult to fight like this," he stated, "when you see Ferrari changing direction as many times as they wanted before the first corner in Turkey and nothing happens, and then we get penalised like this."
Also today, Fernando Alonso furthermore agreed with his director saying that he does not consider Formula One a sport anymore. The world champion was visibly disheartened by the events this morning.
"If you see the video, then if this is blocking intentionally we will have a lot of problems from now on in qualifying. If this is blocking, I don't understand how we will race today if this is the minimum distance (between cars)."
Flavio Briatore was also on fire and made it clear once more that it is impossible to look at this like blocking. One must not forget that Fernando was pushing extremely hard to get over the finish line for one last flying lap after a tyre blew up earlier in the session. While that effectively ruined his chances to fight for a pole position, it allowed him to put himself in 5th place.
"Yesterday Fernando was penalised for the lap, and I want only to tell you, Fernando never intentionally wanted to stop Massa," explained Briatore. You know, he had a tyre accident. Fernando come back to the pits, we checked on the chassis and it was quite dangerous to send Fernando out again."
"But we are fighting for the championship and the people need to see a show. This is the reason why we love the sport, this is the reason why Fernando go out and he made the chequered flag to start his quickest lap by one second. We told him by radio to drive like a qualifying lap on his out lap because really we were very, very tight, because we check the chassis and the suspension. He did a perfect job and we had no intention to stop Massa."
You can judge for yourself if Alonso really blocked Massa. The movie clearly shows Fernando was well ahead of the Brazilian Ferrari driver.
From the video it is very very clear that Alonso is well ahead of Massa and could not have blocked him.
