F1 Fanatic

The irony of Prost giving out one of the trophies!!

And Damon Hill!

LOL.

Being Dutch, nope, that’s not it.
I heard the radio interview.

I think what Keith wrote, that he made that dash more in a reflex to prevent Magnussen to pass him than attacking Bianchi there. As for taking Frijns to court, if he does that I agree with what @prisoner-monkeys writes, it will hurt him more than do any good.
After all it should end up with the courts pointing him back to the Stewards / FIA anyway, as they are the governing body for a the sport, and I can hardly imagine anything else this ruling was about.

@matt90

Then that is truly bizarre.

Also, the Tweet that first reported a court case also mentions that Frijns had been given a 25-second penalty. If the demand for legal action came before the penalty was give – and if it was intended to mean stewards’ action – then I imagine they would be Tweeted separately.

@bascb

After all it should end up with the courts pointing him back to the Stewards / FIA anyway, as they are the governing body for a the sport, and I can hardly imagine anything else this ruling was about.

I don’t even know how Bianchi could get the case into the courtroom. He wouldn’t be able to press charges, because there has been no crime; he’d have to prove that Frijns deliberately ran him off the road, and he’d have a devil of a time doing that because the stewards already judged him to have caused an avoidable accident, but didn’t issue any penalty for doing it deliberately.

So a civil case would be his only option, but even then, he’s got nothing. The stewards’ verdict would weigh heavily in Frijns’ favour, since they have access to footage and telemetry read-outs that we don’t. And what’s more, he would have to prove that he would have won the title were it not for that accident – and with eleven minutes’ worth of racing left at the time of the collision, he would not be able to prove; a) that Frijns would have been passed and beaten by Magnussen, which would have given Bianchi the title; b) that Magnussen would have passed Frijns, but not Bianchi, which would have given Frijns the title; and c) that Frijns would not have re-passed him before the end of the race, which would have given Frijns the title. Nor would he be able to prove that he would have finished the race at all – for all he knew, his team were keeping an eye on a mechanical issue that would have sidelined him anyway.

What’s more, if Bianchi really wanted to launch legal action, then he would have to launch it against his own team, for getting him disqualified at Aragon, and against whoever caused him to finish 17th at Spa and 12th at the Nurburgring, and whoever caused him to spin in the first Catalunya race (assuming he had help). He can’t selectively launch action against one party, but not the other, because it makes him look like a hypocrite – if the team had given him the right parts in Aragon, then it would not have mattered if Frijns pushed him off the road in Barcelona, because Bianchi would have won the title already.

Agreed. It was a very silly thing to do and clearly Frijns’ fault, but it was not intentional.

Sorry, probably what I said earlier was a bit strict. I hadn’t seen the incident more than 2 times so my opinion wasn’t the most correct. Sorry.

Some really sour grapes in that press release! That just convinces me more that the right driver, and team, took the title.

With Frijns suddenly under attack from Magnussen there was every doubt over his intentions, and I thought the penalty was fair – the equivalent of a stop & go for “an avoidable collision”, applied after the race to allow some proper investigation to take place, and not influenced by the championship situation, which is as it should be. And it was nothing like Schumacher turning into the side of Villeneuve! Anyway, it was Bianchi’s own stupid fault that he went into the final race behind on points…

I don’t agree with the Tech 1 press statement that Frijns’s move was in the same category as Schumacher 1997, though as a fan of Frijns the collision did give me an uneasy feeling.

I haven’t seen Robin’s every race, but he always struck me as a slightly cautious driver, and I don’t recall him being involved in any other incidents. So his move on Bianchi was a little out of character at the least; it was a high-risk move, and could he have knowingly taken that risk thinking “well, if it does go wrong there’s still a chance I’ll be champion”? Possibly. Unfortunately, from the camera angle we can’t really see what’s going on. We’d need the onboard from Frijns to get a clearer picture. The stewards did have access to that footage and more, and they ruled it a normal avoidable collision, though they took three hours to reach their decision, so in that sense it wasn’t a straightforward racing incident, either.

I hope Frijns can have a successful young drivers test and move on from this.