[jambutty]

Although not a particular fan of F1 (I much prefer Moto GP) as it is nothing more than a two hours procession of ultra fast cars, I will admit that I am biased in favour of Lewis Hamilton because he is a British driver, a very good one at that and also a rookie to the F1 world.

I’ve watched the incident a number of times on TV and it seems to me that Lewis went to overtake the Ferrari because it went a bit too wide in the corner and left enough room for Lewis to do so. As he drew alongside Kimi Raikkonen, the Ferrari pulled over and pushed Lewis off the track. Their wheels touched. That left the British driver with nowhere to go except to cross the chicane or cause an accident.

As Lewis came off the chicane in front of the Ferrari he quite rightly backed off so that he didn’t gain an advantage of a manoeuvre forced onto him. Once the Ferrari was back in front Lewis pulled into the Raikkonen’s ‘slip stream’ got the slingshot he was looking for and overtook him.

The irony is that within one lap Raikkonen crashed because of race conditions and a mistake by Kimi, so even if Hamilton had not overtaken him Lewis would still have won the race.

The incident had no bearing whatsoever on any of the other drivers. Massa who was some 14 seconds behind Lewis and Kimi, and Heidfeld 10 seconds behind Massa, did not have enough laps left to be able to try and catch and overtake the two leaders especially in the rain swept conditions at the time.

Lewis was robbed and I hope that the appeal gets the decision overturned. If it doesn’t then what bit of credibility the F1 circuit had, will be dispersed.

It was a similar story years ago during the last race of the season when Damon Hill was overtaking Michael Schumacher who had run wide and thus left a gap for Hill to get through and to go on and win the race and also the Grand Prix title. Schumacher deliberately turned into Hill and crashed then both. A safe manoeuvre seeing as they were barely moving at the time. As neither finished this ensured that Schumacher won the Grand Prix title. You could see from Damon Hill’s face during the after race interviews that his diplomatic “it was a racing incident” wasn’t what he was really thinking. The ensuing inquest by the stewards was of the opinion that it was “a racing incident” and no action was taken against Schumacher and Ferrari. But then it was a Ferrari.