The post-race mystery
In a season of a thousand twists and turns, which risks being decided by just a few points, especially in the challenge for the Drivers’ title, Baku’s post-match is tinged with yellow. The color is not a coincidence, because the Azerbaijan GP ended under the Virtual Safety Car following the accident between Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez. However, perhaps not everyone noticed that the VSC regime remained active even after the checkered flagto allow marshals to safely intervene at the scene of the accident. Some drivers were evidently distracted and overtook other cars on their way back to the pits as if it were a normal end of race.
Radio signaling
Among these there was also Max Verstappenwhich in fact was investigated by the stewards together with the two Alpines and Nico HulkenbergThe first to notice Verstappen’s behaviour – potentially incorrect – was his rival for the title Landon Norriswho immediately opened the radio signalling the incident to his pit wall: “Max is outdoing everyone – said Norris – but there’s still the VSC, right? So…I don’t know if it’s an important thing, but there’s the VSC”. “Yes, we noticed it.“, the answer came from his track engineer.
The precedent of Q1
Norris then wanted to highlight the incident again in the post-race interviews, also in relation to what happened to him in Q1 yesterdaywith the yellow flag coming out which forced him to abort his last timed attempt and consequently be eliminated early: “I had VSC written on the dashboard and yellow lights. So it was a similar situation to the one I had yesterday – the English comment – there was an accident and there were paramedics on the track and stuff like that, which means you can’t overtake, but he was overtaking and I wondered about that. I asked my team, because I thought you can’t overtake, but maybe I’m wrong”.
#Yellow #Verstappen #overtaking #VSC #checkered #flag
