The FIA are set to hear Ferrari’s evidence regarding why Sebastian Vettel’s first victory of the 2019 Formula 1 season should not have been stripped from him.
Scuderia Ferrari have persistently pursued having Sebastian Vettel’s Canadian Grand Prix victory-stripping penalty reviewed following this race on Sunday, June 9, and on Friday, the FIA are set to hear their evidence as why his victory in the 21-race 2019 Formula 1 season’s seventh race should not have been handed to Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport’s Lewis Hamilton.
Vettel went off of the 14-turn, 2.71-mile (4.361-kilometer) Circuit Gilles Villeneuve road course on Parc Jean-Drapeau in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on the 70-lap races 48th laps between turns three and four while leading over Hamilton in second place.
As he reentered the track, he was still trying to get control of his car, and in doing so, he caused Hamilton to take evasive action to avoid a collision.
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While neither driver gained an advantage over the other, Vettel was issued a five-second time penalty that ultimately relegated him to second while handing Hamilton his fifth victory of the season. Vettel won the race by 1.342 seconds, but he was officially scored 3.658 seconds behind Hamilton and just ahead of teammate Charles Leclerc in third.
Ferrari first announced their intention to appeal this penalty before announcing that they had made the decision to do so. However, they later revealed that they actually had not appealed the penalty and that they no longer planned to do so but that they still planned to challenge the penalty via “right of review”. On Monday, they officially requested a review.
That leads us to what is scheduled to take place tomorrow. Ahead of this Sunday’s French Grand Prix at Circuit Paul Ricard, Canadian Grand Prix race stewards are set to reconvene and hear Ferrari’s evidence as to why Vettel should not have been stripped of his victory in this race.
If the evidence that Ferrari have come up with, evidence that supposedly was not available at the time the race stewards made their initial decision to penalize him, is, in fact, deemed new and tenable by the FIA, then the FIA will officially review the penalty to determine whether or not it will stand. Ferrari have not yet commented publicly about this new evidence.
Will what would have been Sebastian Vettel’s first victory of the 2019 Formula 1 season in the Canadian Grand Prix end up becoming just that, or will the initial decision to penalize him stand, thus allowing Lewis Hamilton to keep the victory?