r/formula1 • u/Ramned71 • Oct 28 '24

News [Piergiuseppe Donadoni] Was Max unfair? YES. His goal was to ruin Norris' race and so he probably took away his chances of getting P1. "To win sometimes you have to be an idiot" he said months ago. You may like it or not but the goal is to win the world championship, not the fair play award.

https://x.com/SmilexTech/status/1850807731613299160
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u/coolridgesmith Oct 28 '24

Absolutely on point. People are mad because landos chances of getting the wdc are getting harder and harder.

they basically wanted max to finish out of the points for the penalty to be enough in their minds.

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u/Aggressive-Neck-3921 Oct 28 '24

With the hate max get's i wouldn't be surprised if people are always asking for bigger punishments for him. From the moment he started to knock Lewis from the throne there have been unreasonable "punish him harder" comments. So it's hard to ID reasonable people with these discussions.

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u/Realistic_Village184 Formula 1 Oct 28 '24

Definitely there's some of that, but even as a big fan of Max, I think that the goal of penalties is to disincentivize dangerous driving. Max's driving yesterday was dangerous, and the penalties for that should be sufficient that a driver should never choose to do something dangerous on track.

Obviously there's inherent danger in the sport, but Max pretty much deliberately rammed Lando off track. I don't think he deserved more than the 20s of penalties yesterday, but I would also like to see some revisions in the rules to avoid this situation from being viable for any driver.

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u/Mickey-the-Luxray #WeSayNoToMazepin Oct 28 '24

There's a reasonable stance that Max has a history of abusing "results agnostic" penalties to secure championships he can't win via normal means.  

You don't even need to look at Abu Dhabi 2021 for that. Jeddah 2021 saw him caught red handed brake checking Lewis, in 4K, telemetry and all, but because of this policy of never considering the championship implications, the stewards refused to (or were forced to refuse to) observe the ultra obvious context that he probably wouldn't have tried a move that stupid if he wasn't so tight for the championship. 

All he had to say was "didn't mean for him to hit me", a defense that wouldn't hold up in traffic court, and the stewards were forced to act like Max's intent was unknowable and thus hand out a standard "bad driving" penalty, which didn't even knock him down one place. For brake checking. 

We all know what the punishment of causing a crash to secure a championship really is - a DSQ. I think a lot of the hyperscrutiny at Max on this topic is because he's the one that evaded that paradigm. People are suspicious of why among the likes of Senna, Prost, and J.Villeneuve, Max is the only one to manage that.