Post race recall

Out-rage-ous! You can colour us mightily pissed off today. We were originally going to go off on one with an extended rant on the iniquities of Setanta, who have unsportingly refused to share England highlights with a terrestrial audience.

But alas no that particular line of invective must wait for another time as our seething levels of bile have been sent surging by the Stewards Enquiry into yesterday’s Belgian Grand Prix.

Civilisation and possibly the entire world/omniverse as we know it may all be about to disappear into a black hole in Cern (and by the way did we miss a memo, which twat greenlighted that?) but some things are more important than the impending end of the world and civilisation as we know it.

At the end of one of the most exciting Grand Prixs in recent memory, which had us literally hopping and hollering on the sofa, the F1 stewards rescinded Lewis Hamilton’s win with a highly dubious penalty for cutting the chicane.

The story of the race? Capitalising on Hamilton’s early spin, Raikkonen dominated for nearly the entire race, but with just a few laps remaining, the rain began to fall and Lewis, back in the hunt, slowly began to reel in Kimi until he was right on his tail.

In the midst of a gripping old fashioned wheel-to-wheel duel in supremely sketchy conditions, Hamilton and Raikkonen go into the Bus Stop together and with Kimi holding his line. Rather than crash, Lewis is forced to run wide gaining a slight advantage, but crucially letting Kimi retake the lead as they cross the start-finish line.

Then it’s game on again and as Kimi tries to defend, Lewis makes a breathless pass on the inside before being rammed from behind at the next corner. Down the road Kimi overtakes again, before crashing out as both cars try to avoid a spinning backmarker and Hamilton using his supreme rainmaster skills, nursemaids the McLaren home, 14 seconds ahead of Massa for a superb win.

Or it should have been. The perfect rejoinder to a sport often accused of lacking excitement, this was nerve-shredding head-to-head racing at its finest and to sully the result with such a dubious recall does F1 absolutely no favours at all.

It also does nothing to dispel suspicions of an inherent Ferrari bias at its highest levels.

If the positions had been reversed and it was a Ferrari driver standing on the podium, say Michael Schumacher a few years ago, the suspicion lingers that the manoeuvre would have been applauded and the result would have been allowed to stand.

Such highly questionable decisions immensely damage F1’s credibility as the pinnacle of world motorsport.