For those who watched the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on the world television feed, it was not immediately obvious why the stewards had summoned Sergio Perez to speak to them shortly after the chequered flag dropped due to his “statements made on the radio”.
But anyone watching his onboard camera via F1 TV would have heard the following:
“The stewards are a joke, man. I cannot believe it. They have been very bad this year but this is a joke. That was really a joke.”
Perez was frustrated by the five-second penalty the stewards issued him for colliding with Lando Norris while trying to pass the McLaren driver. He made his remark on the radio after being told the upshot of the penalty was that he wouldn’t stand on the final podium of the season.
This was far from the first time anyone in F1 has been censured for criticising FIA staff. Haas team principal Guenther Steiner was reprimanded earlier this year for describing the stewards as “laymen” in an interview with print media. Two years ago, Perez’s team principal Christian Horner accused a “rogue marshal” of causing Max Verstappen to incur a grid penalty, and was given an official warning over his choice of words.
Despite having fallen foul of the rules in a similar way, Horner defended his driver’s reaction afterwards. “I think he was just voicing his frustration,” he said.
“The problem is, if you’re a football player and you have a rant, you haven’t got a microphone on your shirt. Whereas you can understand his frustration, he’s lost a podium, he’s driven a great race, so he’s had a vent. But unfortunately, that vent is has been broadcast. So hopefully the stewards will take that into consideration when I think he’ll be speaking to them later.”
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Horner also suggested the driver’s representative on the stewards’ panel, ex-Red Bull and Toro Rosso driver Vitantonio Liuzzi, should have been more understanding of Perez’s situation.
“The driver steward that is here this weekend is well known to have had a few rants in his day as well when he used to drive for me many years ago. So it happens. He was just fortunate that it wasn’t broadcast.”
When Liuzzi was racing, only a tiny number of radio messages were typically played on the world feed during a race. There was no F1 TV where fans could listen in on the drivers’ communications with their engineers throughout…
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