Contact is irrelevant. Masi said so himself after Hamilton's penalty at silverstone.
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This has made the FIA hypocritical as **** and suggests actually they either do let consequences influence their decision or they have been influenced by who the driver was or the championship situation. None of that looks good.
What is worse is that some drivers have already suggested that they are now allowed to run people wide off the track to defend a position, which for me is only going to cause more accidents and probably more dangerous ones, especially on high speed corners.
Honestly if you think breaking late and going off track forcing another driver even further off track is fair racing then I think you need to stick to rugby. I'll put it another way. In rugby, if you go for an intercept and knock it down it's a penalty. Yes you may not have intended to knock down and intended to catch it, but you failed. That's the risk you took. Catch it, high reward, miss and it's a penalty. Same here with Verstappen. If he had manged to pull it off and actually make the apex, then he deserved to keep the place. However, he didn't and he failed in a big way forcing another driver off the track. That's a penalty. He gambled and lost and the only thing that saved him is an FIA that is either spineless or biased.