
Another debate has been emerged from Brazil, which was the involved among championship rivals Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. During the last race weekend at Brazil an aggressive Hamilton try to overtake leader Verstappen at turn 4 on lap 47, but the Max slightly defend the move, and both are running wide from the track, before Hamilton eventually passed for the lead on Lap 59.
Following the incident Stewards decided that no investigation was necessary with it later being revealed that the FIA did not have all the footage to review during the race. Today, finally Formula 1 has released the forward-facing onboard footage from Verstappen’s Red Bull.
Asked by the source Autosport if the FIA had access to the pictures when making the call during the race, Masi confirmed that it did not.
“No, it was only the cameras that are broadcast, as I’ve said before, which is basically what we have access to throughout,” Masi said.
“The forward facing, the 360, there’s all of the camera angles that we don’t get live that will be downloaded and we’ll have a look at them post-race,” he said. “It hasn’t been obtained yet. It’s been requested.”
Masi agreed that the forward facing footage could be a smoking gun, if, for example, it shows Verstappen steering towards Hamilton.
“Could be, absolutely. Possibly. But no, we didn’t have access to it. And obviously, it’s being downloaded. And once the commercial rights holder supplies it, we’ll have a look.”
Toto Wolff, Mercedes F1 team boss, told Sky Sports F1: “I think [if] you put the helmet on and said that that’s hard defending just to the limit. Lewis was super clever avoiding the contact, so it was great to see these two super drivers.
“But not giving it a five seconds [penalty] or so? Come on.”
Red Bull F1 team boss Christian Horner saw it differently.
“It’s two guys running hard,” said Horner. “Lewis has got a run around the outside, Max has gone in deep, they’ve both gone wide.
“It would have been really unfair to penalise on that. If it was the other way around, I would have told my sporting director to have a moan about it but I wouldn’t have expected really anything from it.”