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Thanks, The Ridge Wallet. And now - onto the video!
Watching Bottas and Russell collide and crash pretty violently out of the Imola Grand Prix
led to a lot of debate across fans - and between the drivers in the heat of the moment - over
who was to blame for the incident. This is pretty normal. Whenever there’s
a close tussle between drivers that ends up with one or both of them losing out with damage
or running off track and losing time, there’s an instinctive need to determine who was most
at fault. In the Russell/Bottas incident, Russell had
slipstream and DRS resulting in significant overspeed on Bottas. That is, he had a serious
speed advantage down the main straight and towards turn 2 - the first real corner of
the track. Unusually for a Mercedes, particularly against
a small fish like Williams, Bottas was a bit of a sitting duck really.
The run to turn 2 is the merest kink of a high speed chicane - turn 1 ever so slightly
bears right and then the track turns back left again. There’s a boring reason around
corner geometry as to why the first kink is an official corner and the second isn’t,
but that’s not the point of this video. We’re not here to (sigh) kink shame.
Russell follows Bottas through this first kink of turn 1 and by the time they reach
the second left hand kink he’s closed right up to the Mercedes and pulls out right to
take Bottas on what will be the outside of turn 2.
While Bottas is firmly on the inside when Russell initiates the move, Valtteri does
start to move across the track to the right so by the time Russell is half way alongside,
the space has closed significantly. This seems to surprise Russell, who makes
a slight avoiding move to the right, drifting onto the damp tarmac and white paint of a
still-drying track, at which point the rear grip on the Williams disappears and kicks
the car around and into the Mercedes. Both drivers are basically passengers at this point.
Russell, in reactionary anger, claimed Bottas defended too hard and closed him out. Bottas
said Russell was foolish to drive so hard on the wet part of the track in trying to
overtake. Immediate reaction from fans fell roughly
into those camps. Who was to blame? Well, I’m actually here to discuss when
negative actions on track fall into that middle ground - the racing incident. When, sometimes,
both drivers are doing their best - taking a risk, obviously - but things just happen
through no decisive fault of any one driver. That’s motorsport, baby.
So let’s wind back the Russell/Bottas incident as an example, here.
Yes, Bottas does move across the track here. But there are two important things to take
into consideration. First is that this is a left kink. And the
natural line through the exit of the corner is to drift from the inside apex to the outside,
ready for turn 2. If this was a straight and Bottas moved across,
that might be another story, depending on how he did it.
But actually, we do see people moving across legitimately to defend on straights all the
time. And heading towards turn 2, Bottas didn’t move particularly aggressively, or surprisingly
and indeed left more than a car’s width for Russell.
Russell’s onboard shows the Mercedes only slightly crosses the pit exit line, an area
designed with ample room for car’s rejoining the track from the pit lane.
So Russell did seem to have enough room and probably over-reacted to the closing space,
unwittingly expecting Valtteri to stay further inside.
And if you look at other overtakes in that same area - Hamilton being the best example
- you’ll see a similar amount of space available and aggression given by the defender but Lewis
holds a braver line around the outside. These aren’t quite comparable due to different
track conditions, but the point remains that if Russell had held his line a little more
firmly, he might have had a good chance down into turn two.
So is it Russell’s fault then? I’d say, yes it was his -mistake- but not one worthy
of a racing infraction. It was a minor error in the heat of the moment that blew up into
catastrophic consequences. The move was on the table, there was no harm
in him going for it. But he mis-stepped. It wasn’t an overly aggressive overtake, just
a drift onto a slippery surface. A racing incident.
A racing incident is something that just might happen when you’ve got very fast cars fighting
together on track with centimetres to spare and split seconds to make decisions.
And I think that’s a key thing people (including me) need to remember: this is all happening
in a matter of seconds, maybe fractions of a second.
We get the luxury of multiple replays, slow motion, analysis and discussion debating who
should have done what and why. But the drivers - they get one chance, in
one short moment, to decide what to do. How late to brake. Where to position the car.
Whether to go for a move or wait for the next opportunity. Will there even be a next opportunity?
And if they make a decision and the track has less grip than they thought, or the other
car moves in a way they didn’t expect, or even if they make a slight misjudgement over
how quickly they can get the car slowed down… they could be off track, damaged, forcing
someone onto the grass, or taking both cars out.
These are top tier drivers being paid the big dollars so we can only give them so much
leeway, of course. They are supposed to be able to make these marginal calls in the shortest
of time. To know and feel the car and the situation. But it is so often a quick and
marginal judgement. And we need to remember that.
So what might have made the Bottas/Russell case -not- a racing incident?
As with our recent chat about Track Limits, we head to good old Article 27 of the sporting
regulations, which details driving. This Article is actually pretty short and
section 27.4 is the important part here: “At no time may a car be driven unnecessarily
slowly, erratically or in a manner which could be deemed potentially dangerous to other drivers
or any other person.” This is… pretty vague isn’t it? It’s
been worded this way for years, and deliberately so. This greyness of definition gives the
stewards a lot of room for using context to assess each individual situation on its merits
and try to come to a fair conclusion. Slamming on the brakes to surprise a car nipping
at your heels; darting across the track at the last minute or doing some obnoxious weaving
would all be cause for the stewards’ concern, for example.
But there are some key ‘bad manoeuvres’ that are generally understood between the
drivers and stewards that will immediately put you under the spotlight of shame.
In fact, these behaviours were hard coded into the sporting regulations for a while
until they were compounded into the broader, less explicit version we just read out.
If we look at the first draft of the 2017 sporting regulations against its revision,
we see the simple, if vague, language of the current article 27.4 was previously expanded
into four much more specifically worded articles. For example - you shouldn’t move in more
than one direction to defend your position. Like, you can’t zig zag like a road block.
That’s dangerous and a bit unfair, honestly. You can move across in one direction to defend,
and you can move back to get a racing line into the corner, but you can only move back
so far as to leave enough room for another car.
You can use the full width of the track to defend your position, but if the attacking
car has so much as a front wing alongside you, you need to leave them room.
Your defending move has to take place before the braking zone. This is because by the time
a driver slams on the brakes, they’ve committed to a trajectory and distance over which their
car will decelerate before turn-in. It’s incredibly hard to react to some knucklehead
moving across the track in front of you once you’re in the braking zone.
Also, don’t barge or crowd other cars off track or do anything weird and erratic that
could cause an accident. As said earlier, these drivers are operating at high speeds
and short time frames. You can’t just go ‘Boo! Scared you.’
Now while these ‘codes of driving conduct’ were removed from the regulations in their
explicit, descriptive form these behaviours form part of the many moves understood to
be not particularly acceptable. While some think it’s better to have hard
definitions in the regulatory language so we all know exactly when a move is right or
wrong, the teams preferred the stewards to be a little more hands off unless there were
cases of clearly dangerous driving. So now the stewards assess each case on its merit
over whether it deserves investigation and perhaps penalty.
The stewards have access to archival video examples as precedent to work against when
needing to make a decision. So while a lot of incidents may fall more
towards the blame of one driver than another, unless they are driving unfairly or dangerously,
we are likely to have many of these cases deemed as ‘racing incidents’.