Apart from winning the 2023 Constructors’ championship, Red Bull Racing also raised multiple eyebrows on Sunday. This incident came after the Austrian team tweaked a rule to have double DNF of Sergio Perez and in doing so, they took a leaf out of Michael Schumacher’s book, as per a post on Reddit.
The race at Suzuka saw Red Bull pull off one of a kind moves with Perez as they retired the Mexican’s number 11 car at first and then ordered the car to move back to the track again to avoid a grid penalty in Qatar. This happened after the Red Bull star received four timed penalties for multiple on-track collisions.
Highlight of the race so far:
Sergio Perez getting back on the track/pit-lane to get his final 5 sec penalty after being DNF 20 mins ago. #Suzuka #JapaneseGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/5ZHluX5mEP
— Ameer Hamza Asif (@AmeerHamzaAsif) September 24, 2023
Perez made contact with Lewis Hamilton, Carlos Sainz, Fernando Alonso, and Kevin Magnussen and received four penalty points. Therefore, running Perez made no sense as he would have been out of points already. However, Red Bull played their trick and got a big advantage.
How is Michael Schumacher related to Sergio Perez on today’s date?
As Red Bull pulled off a tweaked move, it was similar to what Ferrari did with Schumacher back in 1998. It was the British Grand Prix of that year and the German driver was leading the race by over 32 seconds. Amid this, Schumacher overtook a backmarker in Safety Car condition which earned him a 10-second time penalty.
However, the rulebook back then did not specify that if it would be a stop-and-go penalty or the time would be added to the timesheet after the race. Having seen the loophole, Ross Brawn, Ferrari’s technical director back then made the important call which saw Schumacher finish the race 22 seconds ahead of runner-up Mika Hakkinen.
This was almost a similar move made by the Milton-Keynes-based team last Sunday. However, after seeing the loophole, the FIA would now reanalyze the entire situation to prevent things like this from happening in the future.
Schumacher’s move called for huge controversy
After the FIA found that Ferrari and Michael Schumacher played with the rule, they took immediate action to avoid such things happening in the future. The move indeed created a huge controversy and it led to the race stewards getting their licenses revoked.
McLaren took Ferrari to the International court over their 1998 British GP move. However, it wasn’t able to reverse the race results. This end promoted the governing body to rethink it and establish new parameters.
Similarly, in the case of Red Bull, the FIA also announced to take proper and thorough discussion before taking any hasty decision in order to prevent such loopholes from being used by any team in the future.
