Masi chose let them race over Verstappen warning

FIA race director Michael Masi came tropical to issuing Max Verstappen with a warning for his defensive move versus Lewis Hamilton in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, but opted to stick with the philosophy of letting the drivers race.

Verstappen tried to outbrake Hamilton into Turn 4 as the Mercedes suburbanite looked set to take the lead without using DRS on the outside of the Red Bull. While Hamilton appeared worldly-wise to make the corner Verstappen ran wide, forcing them both off the circuit. Masi noted the incident but decided no investigation was necessary, and says it was a resulting tideway with what the drivers have asked for.

“I disagree it is inconsistent,” Masi said. “If you squint at it, as I’ve said many times before, you judge the incident on its merits, and you have a squint at all of it. Let’s not forget we have the overall let them race principles. And looking at it all, with the angles we had available, that was the philosophy was adopted.

“I think if you squint at proximity of the cars heading to the apex, where it is, nature of the corner, fact both cars went off, neither car lost position or anything like that, was probably the unstipulated view.

“I looked at it a few times, (it) wasn’t far off a woebegone and white flag to be honest, for Max.”

Despite making a visualization at the time, Masi says he will squint then at the incident from a personal perspective once given increasingly camera angles, as he only had the ones seen on television misogynist to him.

“It was only the cameras that are broadcast, as I’ve said before, is what we have wangle to throughout. (The forward-facing camera) hasn’t been obtained yet. It has been requested.

“We have the forward facing, 360, all the angles that we don’t get live will be downloaded and will have a squint at them.”

When it was put to Masi that Verstappen’s steering input could be telling, he replied: “Could be, absolutely, yeah … but we didn’t have wangle to it. Once we do it from the commercial rights holder we’ll have a look.”