Red Bull has decided to exercise the right of review against the ten-second penalty received by Lewis Hamilton in the British Grand Prix following the contact between the Mercedes driver and Max Verstappen, which led to the Red Bull driver crashing into the barriers at the outside of Copse. The Milton Keynes team believes that the penalty decided by the stewards on the English driver is not fair and after hiring a lawyer they must have found some quirks to hope for a review of the decision taken by the race stewards.
Scuderia Ferrari back in 2019, ahead of the French Grand Prix had prepared an appeal following the five-second penalty imposed on Sebastian Vettel in Canada, a penalty that handed the victory to Lewis Hamilton, much to the disappointment of the German driver: a furious Sebastian Vettel moved the first-place sign away from Lewis Hamilton’s car following a controversial end to the Canadian Grand Prix, to testify that he considered the penalty unfair, considering himself the winner of the last race held in Montreal before the pandemic.
The right of review requires that new and significant elements emerge which were not available to the stewards at the time the decision was made. On the occasion, Ferrari included Karun Chandhok’s video analysis in the new elements to be evaluated. The thesis supported by team principal Mattia Binotto was that Sebastian Vettel could not have done anything else. The Federation sent the video back to the sender, judged as the opinion of a third party, therefore not an actual fact. The complaint presented by Ferrari was rejected by the FIA, we will see if the Red Bull protest will have more luck on Thursday: both Red Bull and Mercedes representatives have been summoned to attend a video conference on Thursday afternoon at 3pm, the opening day of the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend.
