Frankly I don’t think they’ve put a foot wrong all weekend and we should really appreciate that after the poor stewarding we’ve seen earlier this season. All we asked for was consistent, fair ruling, and that’s exactly what, finally, we got.
Of course they relentlessly and meticulously enforced track limits and, in my opinion, were really timely on handing out violations and penalties. Clearly they had a really streamlined system in place. As Ted pointed out, it meant that inconsistent driving was finally penalized and consistency rewarded, which is so refreshing.
On top of that they called the safety car and virtual safety cars exactly as they were needed, coordinated to put the safety car through the pitlane when necessary, and overall managed track incidents very well. Their calls on other incidents like unsafe releases and de Vries’s clumsy defending were also by the book and quickly judged.
It finally feels like race control is doing the job they were meant to do: enforce the rules consistently and not get in the way of the racing. That competence enabled the great racing we saw today and I hope race control teams at other tracks take note of the successes this weekend.
I agree, at least as far as I’ve seen, the most controversial aspect of what they did this weekend is enforcing the already agreed upon rules
It’s mad that it’s only controversial because they usually just let rules slide, so we all just think that some rules are for following and others are serious ones. It’s impossible to not generate disagreements with this current situation.
Update: The stewards have said they had 1,200 reports of track limit infringements to review. They sound as frustrated about them as we do. At the end of their statement they said something like, “As we have in the past, we recommend this track add gravel or grass on turns 9 and 10.”
