After waiting for a long time, the decision has finally arrived. Mercedes has been denied the Right to review.
What is the ‘Right to review’?
Let us state the official statement stated under Article 14 of the FIA International Sporting Code –
A petition for a review must be filed against a Stewards’ decision and can only be granted if a Competitor successfully demonstrates “that a significant and relevant new element is discovered which was unavailable to the parties seeking the review at the time of the decision concerned.”
The four key points here are that the element must be
- Significant
- Relevant
- New
- Unavailable at the time to the parties seeking the review at the time of decision concerned.
Why Mercedes petitioned in the first place?
If you saw the São Paulo GP last weekend or at least were checking the updates, you would know the answer. However, if you don’t then let’s take a dive inside:
Starting at P10, Lewis Hamilton overtook every driver in front with brilliant moves. And when he was about to do the same with Max who was driving in lead, a little incident happened. We’re talking about Lap 48 at Turn 4.
Initially it looked like Max was just racing and because of that Lewis ended up running wide. Such instances have been witnessed previously a lot many times. But when the bigger picture came into view, we saw both of the drivers going wide which raised some eyebrows.
It felt like Max purposefully did that. And this made the Stewards look into the matter. Almost everyone thought that Max will get a penalty but it did not happen.
It was later revealed that Stewards made the decision without looking at the onboard of Max Verstappen. This point became controversial. Questions like, “how can they make a decision without looking at it from every angle?” were put up.
Michael Masi, FIA race director said, “It’s only the cameras that are broadcast is basically what we have access to throughout the week.”
“But we didn’t have access to it,” he continued. “Obviously, it’s been downloaded and once we do, and once the commercial rights holder supplies it, we’ll have a look.”
Therefore after the footage was obtained, Mercedes appealed. Because the change in stewards’ decisions would have also changed the future of the championship. But unfortunately for the Silver Arrows, this did not happen.
The Conclusion
We know the FIA stewards denied the Mercedes appeal. But their reason? The footage did not tick all the four points. Yes, it was relevant, new and certainly unavailable at the time of decision but the stewards did not find the onboard to be significant.
This means that no action will be taken and now we can focus on the last 3 races peacefully or not peacefully, depends on the drama.
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