Formula 1: How the FIA’s decision is a major win for Ferrari

Ferrari’s challenge of Sebastian Vettel’s Canadian Grand Prix penalty fell short of resulting in him being awarded his first victory of the 2019 Formula 1 season, but Ferrari still made out as the big winners in this case.

After the Canadian Grand Prix stewards reconvened at Circuit Paul Ricard ahead of this weekend’s French Grand Prix at the track, the decision was made to deny Scuderia Ferrari’s request to review the penalty that stripped Sebastian Vettel of what would have been his first victory of the 2019 Formula 1 season.

Vettel won the Canadian Grand Prix by 1.342 seconds over Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport’s Lewis Hamilton in second place, but he was scored in second and 3.658 behind Hamilton due to the fact that he was issued a five-second time penalty for an “unsafe” reentry onto the track ahead of Hamilton on lap 48 of the 70-lap race around the 14-turn, 2.71-mile (4.361-kilometer) Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Parc Jean-Drapeau in Montreal, Quebec, Canada after his off-track excursion between turns three and four.

As a result of the FIA’s decision, Hamilton kept his victory, which was his third consecutive victory, his fifth victory in the season’s first seven races and his seventh victory in the last nine races going back to last season. Meanwhile, Mercedes have now won nine consecutive races.

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First and foremost, the FIA inherently made one thing clear based on how they went about this whole matter: there was never, ever, ever a chance that this penalty would be overturned.

Bad news for Ferrari, right?

Wrong.

This is exactly the news that Ferrari needed to hear. In fact, it is the news that I still believe Ferrari set out to hear. Otherwise, why would they pursue a matter that had no chance of succeeding and that had minimal championship significance to begin with?

They wouldn’t, especially not in the matter by which they have been pressing and pressing and pressing their challenge of this penalty over the course of the last two weeks. But they did so anyway, and for one reason: to illustrate the flaws within the Formula 1 rule book.

Let’s face it. The championship “battles”, the word “battle” being used extremely loosely, are over. Only seven of the 2019 season’s 21 races have been completed, but it is all but safe to say that Mercedes will win their sixth consecutive constructor championship while Hamilton will win his third consecutive driver championship, which would be his fifth in the last six seasons and the sixth of his career.

What would Ferrari have gained by having their challenge succeed?

Sure, Vettel is still searching for his first victory since he won the Belgian Grand Prix last August while Ferrari are still searching for their first victory since now Alfa Romeo Racing driver Kimi Raikkonen won the United States Grand Prix last October.

But to think that the Italian team are that desperate for a victory that they would go to such great lengths pursuing a situation that had absolutely no chance of going their way to begin is a bit far-fetched.

Instead, they opened up a whole new can of worms about Formula 1’s rule book, and they completely ripped the cover off of it by not settling for the controversial decision to make Hamilton the winner of the Canadian Grand Prix over Vettel.

Vettel even commented about the matter, stating that he was not surprised about the FIA’s decision. He added the following, according to RaceFans.

"“I think we have so many pages in our regulations that if you want I think you’ll find a paragraph that suits. We obviously don’t share the opinion of the stewards during the race. We thought we could bring something new. Obviously now it’s disappointing that it doesn’t go any further but that’s it, you have to move on.“The problem is that we are heard with these things. I think this started a long time ago when it was about ‘did he cross the white line, use too much kerb’. Let us do what we want. If you are unhappy with how we race or how we drive then build different tracks. It’s easy as that. Don’t build car parks with lines and kerbs on it like [this] one. So anyway it is what it is. As I said there are too many paragraphs but what do you change, how can you change? Just burn the papers.”"

The fact that Ferrari pushed the matter to the point where the FIA had to deem their new evidence not tenable to warrant a review even though the old evidence in itself should have been enough to result in Vettel, not Hamilton, being crowned the Canadian Grand Prix victor proves that the rule book needs an overhaul, just as Vettel stated.

The sentence “I think we have so many pages in our regulations that if you want I think you’ll find a paragraph that suits” illustrates that this is exactly what the FIA proved by rejecting Ferrari’s request to review Vettel’s penalty, and there is no reason to believe that Ferrari had anything else truly in mind when they began this process of challenging this penalty.

The Formula 1 rule book needs an overhaul, and this entire situation, particularly Ferrari’s relentless pursuit of the matter, could not have done a better job to prove it. So while Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel will still be scored with a second place finish in the Canadian Grand Prix, they made out as the big winners in this situation by illustrating this.

Whether or not anything actually happens to the rule book as a result of this situation remains to be seen, but this is a great first step in the right direction.