Vettel penalty decision turned F1 into a farce

After what I would call one of the best races of the 2019 Formula 1 season, the FIA stewards managed to turn the whole Canadian Grand Prix into a farce.

How can any top racing driver like Emanuele Pirro, who I know very well, back his non-driver colleagues and make the decision they did?

This is racing. We all want to see drivers pushing to the limit, yet when they do, some do-gooder steps in and ruins the battle.

Sebastian Vettel drove a fantastic race. He was behind backmarkers when he made his error and as any F1 driver will tell you, if you're within two or three seconds of the car in front, you lose downforce and that's probably what happened to him. So yes, he made a mistake and he ran across the grass.

If the end result is going to be decided in an office, then it's time for me to move onto supporting something like MotoGP

The green stuff offers zero grip and when collecting the car and doing his best to save what could have been a major two-car accident, he came off the grass and back onto the track with a bit of a slide and unintentionally closed the door on Lewis Hamilton.

The other thing to remember here is that Hamilton's car has brakes. If he was showing the responsibility that a five-time world champion should do, he could have used them. Instead he tried to stick his nose into a position that could very easily have ended up with both cars buried into the exit wall at Turn 4.

The stewards' argument was that once Vettel rejoined the track and got the car under control, he still allowed it to drift to the right. Well, any driver would do that, and Hamilton said the same thing. Both drivers got out of it unscathed and their fight should have continued.

This is the sort of racing we all want to see and if the end result is going to be decided in an office, then it's time for me - and I'm pretty sure many other viewers - to move onto supporting something like MotoGP or World Superbikes.

That is real racing, with paint swapping at most corners but still respect between riders, while Formula 1 is now becoming far too orchestrated by the officials. The effort that the teams and drivers put into achieving success should not be diminished by officialdom.

I'm pretty happy that most people will agree with me. I watched the race on Sky Sports F1. It has a huge group of pundits, some of them very experienced and successful racing drivers, and some of them with lots of races behind them in commentary expertise. Not one of them agreed with this decision.

We all want racing and we want to see close battles, and on this occasion when we have it the governing body steps in and dilutes everything.

It was a poor decision by the FIA and detrimental to what F1 should be all about. None of us wants bumper cars, but we need to allow proper racing - which is what was happening in Montreal until that decision.

That little bit of assistance from the FIA in Montreal maintained Mercedes' perfect score - now seven wins from seven races in 2019. And if you look at the actual performance of the teams, Mercedes really deserves its success.

This is the average percentage performance of all 10 teams. It's calculated by taking the fastest lap over each weekend for each team expressed as a percentage of the overall fastest. These can then be averaged out over the season to give equal weighting to each weekend.

Just to show the consistency of Mercedes, I've also included its best and worst from these seven races and which track. The end column is progress, or lack of, comparing all 21 races of 2018 to the first seven of 2019.

I think the big point that you can read from this is that Ferrari, Red Bull, Racing Point and especially Williams have not coped with the 2019 regulations as well as the others. The big winner is McLaren followed by Toro Rosso. At the top of the tree, Mercedes seems to be able to handle just about anything that's thrown at it.

In Montreal, everyone up to Max Verstappen in fifth place was lapped. This just shows the dominance of the top three teams, and even then Max was nearly a minute behind the winner.

As far as race wins is concerned it's 7-0 to Mercedes and unfortunately the nil covers the other nine teams. Yes, Mercedes had some help from the stewards in Montreal, but in general it's a step ahead of everyone and in some cases a complete ladder ahead.

The frustration over the kind of penalty Vettel received is exacerbated by the concerns about whether or not the on-track racing will be improved by the new rules for 2021. If we had wheel-to-wheel stuff going on all the time, this whole situation would be less frustrating.

The 2021 rules package has now been put to the teams. We don't know a lot about it yet, only that it's been received with mixed opinions. But whatever it ends up being like, it needs to give the 'others' more opportunity to stand on the podium.

All I kept hearing from some commentators when watching the coverage from Montreal was that the Mercedes is fastest in section one, the twisty bit, and that the Ferrari is fastest in sections two and three, and that's only because those two sections of the track have straights on them. Well, surprise, surprise - racetracks have been made up with different challenges since the year dot.

Ferrari didn't waver with its set-up and as the track got better its lower downforce and drag approach started to bring the rewards

Getting the best out of a car for each individual track is about the set-up compromises that you have to make. At venues such as Monaco, Hungary and Singapore, which are all maximum downforce, it's just about how much downforce you can generate, and from what we've seen so far in 2019, Mercedes seems to have that edge. But for a track like Montreal the compromise set-up is very different.

Montreal is a circuit where you can actually run a fairly wide downforce range and produce a very similar lap time. Just taking the two cars at the front of the field, Mercedes looks like it had chosen to run at the higher end of the downforce, and hence drag, level. This will give it less risk of potential tyre warm-up issues and reduced tyre degradation, but at the price of slower straightline speed.

Ferrari, on the other hand, is at the lower end of the downforce, and hence drag, level, so might just suffer more tyre warm-up issues and worse degradation. But even if those problems do arise, it will keep a straightline-speed advantage.

Other than the four wheels and tyres, the rear wing is one of the highest drag components on a current F1 car. But its angle and its configuration is adjustable, and if you look at pictures of various cars from Montreal, you'll see the differences in set-up that I'm talking about.

As a very rough rule of thumb, a wing angle reduction that would equate to a loss of 10kg of downforce will give you a speed increase of around 1km/h. So if you're looking for 10km/h, you need to give up roughly 100kg of downforce. When you consider that current F1 cars produce around 1400kg of downforce at around 250km/h, that 100kg is quite a large percentage.

All things being equal and the tyres warming up as required, the Mercedes will be faster through the corners and the Ferrari will be faster down the straight. And that is the set-up that each team's individual simulations have shown is the best compromise for each of them.

Each team will have run through countless simulations and as long as the data they have fed into those simulations is correct, then their individual set-ups will be the result. But they won't have the data on what the grip level would be for driving around on the roads of a construction site, which is what Montreal looked like for at least the first day given its dirty surface.

That's the sort of thing that can really throw you astray. Mercedes would initially have been in better shape, but Ferrari didn't waver with its set-up and as the track got better its lower downforce and drag approach started to bring rewards.

Would Mercedes be slower around the corners with less downforce and hence less drag? Probably. Would it be faster on the straights? Definitely. Would it produce a faster lap time? Possibly, but those simulations show that what it had is the best for its situation.

The exact opposite is true for Ferrari. Again, its simulations show that what it's running is the best for its design.

Adding more confusion to the equation, along comes the dreaded DRS, which at a place like Montreal can give you a speed increase in excess of 15km/h. So a higher downforce producing car tucked in behind a lower downforce producing car with its DRS open will be looking after the tyres better and might just have the chance of nipping past.

That's what Mercedes was banking on if Ferrari qualified ahead. If you look back at when Red Bull won four world championships, its car was a rocketship as far as lap time was concerned, but not fast on the straights.

If Red Bull qualified on pole, which it often did, and could get away at the start, which it often did, then job done. If it didn't, then the team hit trouble.

Vettel showed that being able to get out of the DRS zone over the first couple of laps meant that Mercedes, with its deficit in straightline speed, was not able to challenge down Montreal's long straights.

So, in effect, as far as Ferrari and Vettel were concerned, job done. That was until the stewards stepped in, turning what should have been a memorable race into one that will always be looked back on for the wrong reasons.