Cranes are only to remove cars! Moving a car with a crane, with the pilot inside, is a security treat…

It is a mtter of luck that Hamilton could not score points…

I agree with everyone who says that it was illegal the assistance that hamilton received with the crane… but… I think is fair and legal to receive outside assistance when someone get stuck on grave.

Grave is only used for safety reasons, to reduce the maxium speed of a car when it gets out of the circuit to prevent dangerous injuries (I’m sure we all knew that), but even without rain or anything, if someone gets there accidentally and get stucked, it is most than acceptable than that person should receive outside assistance…
It’s not acceptable to be forced to finish a race because of the grave… I think so… maybe i’m wrong… but still I think that’s why alonso didn’t receive assistance at the bus stop at SPA circuit… On grass you are at your own… it’s up to you… Just check the latest situations and you’ll see it…

And also… for example… Let’s suppose that in the monaco GP some car turns (for any reason) 180 degrees and there’s no ratio to turn around… What’ll happend!??..

Anyway (and after all), always is the marshalls choice. ’bout that, I really don’t want to talk about.!

2. “…WITHOUT GAINING ANY ADVANTAGE FROM THE PRECEDING MOVEMENT OF THE CAR TO A SAFER POSITION, he/she will not be excluded from the race.” Hamilton gained a very large advantage by being placed in a safer place, back on the track, and being allowed to continue.

As I see it there really is no ‘grey area’ here, simply a blatent disregard by the FIA for their own rules in order to insure their interests, namely that Lewis Hamilton-their money maker, is allowed to race.

Bye
Rob

The situation does not have a clear explanation in the rulebook because it should not exist!

I don’t think FIA officials may be specifically to blame as much as the local track’s marshalls, and this repeats a previous comment I’ve made wondering just how much powers the marshalls are or should be given. I believe that the instant a second car started sliding into the same trap, someone should have been frantically waving red flags.

Based on the reading of the rules, there was absolutely no reason for a marshall to have put Hamilton’s car back on the track; if Lewis thought he could continue it was up to him to wait while the cranes cleared all other obstacles, and then it was his responsibility to try and back his car onto the track. It would not surprise me if the cranelifting decision was made by someone in the corner that did not know that aspect of the rules.

They shold have never allowed Hamilton to go on and he was not in a dangerous plce for other drivers.

I can see why Hamilton was high up on the priority list – the other cars were either damaged too badly to continue (e.g. Liuzzi’s suspension had broken) or the driver had already left the car (e.g. Button, who left his car just after Hamilton arrived in the gravel trap). As a result, they could crane Hamilton to the track edge – which was a somewhat quicker way of making the area safe than craning it over the barrier.

Since restarting Hamilton cleared the area quicker than not, and no rules were actually broken in the process, I think the marshals made the right decision. Of course, the silly decision was not immediately red-flagging the event. The moment Adrian Sutil went off, it should have been obvious that relying on the cars getting back to their pits to put on extreme wets wasn’t going to work, even with a Safety Car…

Life is unfair and there will always be incidents that are not adequately covered by rules. No matter how hard we try to imagine strange scenarios and attempt to write rules to cover any eventuality, you can bet that life will think of something nobody has even dreamed of; it’s a principle sometimes described as Sod’s Law, I believe. And when that happens, we write a new rule to cover it – but, in the meantime, someone has slipped through the loophole. Unfair it may be but, hey, that’s life!

If this continues then we will end up with drivers expecting the marshalls to put themselves in more and more dangerous situations just so that they can keep their race hopes alive – which I don’t think is the right thing to be doing.

As for it not mattering in this case because Hamilton didn’t score any points, that’s nonsense – if someone’s broken or bent the rules then those rules were broken no matter what the outcome. On the public roads, if a driver is caught over the alcohol limit then they get punished no matter what, the police don’t follow them home and only punish them if they have an accident or kill someone!

This incident may not have a bearing on the World Championship, but that’s no excuse for ignoring it for that fact alone.

It’s not something that crops up very often, but it is something that needs to be clarified in my view.