Is Vettel playing mind games with Hamilton?

in f1 •  7 years ago 

So I didn't watch the whole Formula 1 2017 Baku Race race but I saw the incident and the following uproar from it. From the video replay below Vettel who drives for Ferrari first drove into the back of Hamilton in the Mercedes car. Vettel then immediately raises his hand basically saying that Hamilton had deliberatly slowed down which had caused the incident.


Source:YouTube F1 Racers

Then Vettel drives up beside Hamilton and swerves into his car damaging them both slightly. For this swerve Vettel received a 10 second stop-and-go penalty as it was deemed to be dangerous driving which it clearly was. They were both moving at slow speeds at the time because of a restart but still you can't be doing this as a professional driver.

Interestingly enough the race data later showed that Hamilton had not applied any brakes or looked like he had slowed down deliberately. So was Vettel trying to get under the nose of Hamilton on purpose? With driving into the back of Hamilton's car it does seem unlikely but you never know, these elite drivers are super competitive! I feel it's more like Vettel just misjudged the pace for a split second and then in a rage took it out on Hamilton with the following swerve incident!

In the end Vettel actually ended up finishing the race in 4th place just a split second in front of Hamilton. Vettel leads the drivers’ championship by 14 points now but he is a 3 point penalty away from a race ban, so he will have to drive cleanly or possibly lose his points advantage.

Anyway it makes it a little more interesting for the rest of the season. Hopefully there won't be any more of that kind of deliberate contact but we may see very aggressive direct driving between these two rivals in future races!

Thanks for reading!


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Vettel is one of the top drivers and I think due to few saftey car breaks he was under stress to have a good start, so he wanted to keep as close as possible to Hamilton. At the looks of it a bit too close for the style of stop&go games everybody are playing when driving behind SC. Getting furious afterwards is a matter of emotions which we all know sometimes are hard to control; luckily nothing happend in this reaction and we ended up seeing a interesting race afterall :)
I am looking forward how they will act in next races....

Yeh if Hamilton had reacted back man that would have been an ugly thing for the sport.

I agree with you. Somehow yesterday I got a feeling that Hamilton-Rosberg plays were over but now I feel we might have a new play for this year after initial friendly atmosphere, relation among Hamilton and Vettel might turn arround - and that will just spice up the races for both fans...

Ha yeh a new England - Gemany rivalry is born!!

I liked that post, keep up the good work.

Thanks!

Vettel is a beast, so incredibly talented!

Agreed he is an amazing driver! Just wonder why he did that today.

I wasn't so surprised to be honest.. everybody has their weak moments.. he's only a human after all. What we show to the world outside isn't always corresponding to what's inside us. Yesterday we just saw a simple demonstration of this reality.

Yeh that's true and I guess the pressure they are under I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.

Part of the explanations could be that after similar incidents one of them often gets retired..

Nice.

Thanks