FIA defends itself over Ralf crash

Drivers were furious that Schumacher had to wait almost three minutes from the moment of impact for medical personnel to arrive at the scene, and that they were then forced to drive through debris from the crash under the Safety Car - which they believe could have been avoided had they been taken through the pit lane instead.

Mark Webber, director of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association which has requested talks with the FIA following the incident, says lessons need to be learned from the weekend.

"What happened with Ralf was totally unacceptable," the Australian told this week's Autosport magazine. "We have to speak to the FIA because two minutes is a long time if you are in trouble. We have to learn from it. It is easy now to make criticisms, but we have got to all sit together and make sensible decisions. It was a bizarre race with lots of circumstantial things that knocked on and on.

"Tyre failures on these cars are dangerous. The FIA knows that. They are not stupid and we don't want to be trigger happy, but if you look at the worse cases of having debris on the track, this would be right up there."

But the FIA is satisfied that Schumacher's accident was handled in the correct manner, and a spokesman also justified the race director's decision not to stop the race.

"The safety car, medical car and fast intervention cars were deployed by race control without delay and the first car to reach the incident was the closest emergency vehicle," he told Reuters. "We require emergency medical personnel to arrive at an incident within two minutes. This was achieved and we were therefore satisfied with the response time."