Monza triggered Abu Dhabi memories for Hamilton

In brief

Monza shows inconsistency of Abu Dhabi race – Hamilton

The Mercedes driver lost the championship last year when the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was hurriedly restarted on the final lap, in contravention of the rules, after only a portion of the lapped cars had been allowed to unlap themselves. Yesterday’s race finished behind the Safety Car as race control ran out of time to arrange a restart.

Hamilton told Sky the final laps at Monza “bring memories back” of his title defeat. “That is the rules, how it should be, right?

“There’s only one time in the history of the sport that they haven’t done the rules like that today and that’s the one where it changed the result of the championship. But it is what it is.”

Zhou narrowly avoided crash with De Vries behind Safety Car

Nyck de Vries was given a reprimand for erratic driving behind the Safety Car following a near-miss with Zhou Guanyu. Alfa Romeo accepted the decision but head of trackside engineering Xevi Pujolar said incident had been potentially dangerous.

“It was a bit strange because De Vries suddenly slowed down in a way that Zhou didn’t expect and actually if we didn’t manage to avoid him, we would have just crashed into the back of him,” he explained. “So it was not ideal.

“That’s why drivers should not drive like this in this situation because it can be dangerous. The stewards decided that was okay, no further action. That’s what’s happened and we’ll take it like this. But for Zhou actually he had a bit of a surprise.”

Stewards apologise to Vips over penalty error

The Formula 2 stewards apologised to Jüri Vips who served a more severe penalty than he was issued following a miscommunication. He was issued 10-second penalty contact with Liam Lawson during the race, but this was incorrectly described as as much harsher sanction.

“Due to an administrative error a 10 second stop-and-go penalty was shown on the timing screen from Race control,” the stewards explained. “The team correctly served the erroneous penalty as posted before it could be corrected. There is no mechanism to fix this error and an apology is offered to the driver and team.”

Kush Maini was also incorrectly issued a five-second penalty for track limit…