Lewis Hamilton blames F1 power unit rules after Liam Lawson near-miss
Lewis Hamilton has blamed the power unit rules for impeding Lawson
Lewis Hamilton insists his impeding of Liam Lawson during FP2 at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was a consequence of F1’s new power unit regulations rather than a mistake on his part.
The stewards gave Hamilton a driving reprimand as he “did not follow the traffic-management instructions and unnecessarily impeded” Lawson.
Lewis Hamilton explains Liam Lawson near-miss in Baku practice
Hamilton was completing an out-lap during FP2 when Lawson came charging on a qualifying simulation run and encountered the slow-moving Ferrari driver at Turn 19.
“Oh my god, that is so **** dangerous,” Lawson told Racing Bulls.
In making their decision, the stewards “took into account the difficulty to manage the energy deployment from Turn 16 to Turn 19 and the end of the lap”, but ruled that the impeding was “severe”. They therefore imposed a driving reprimand rather than a warning.
Hamilton, however, says it wasn’t an error on his part; it was more a case of the extreme closing speed between a driver ahead who is harvesting energy and a driver behind who is deploying energy”
The Briton revealed he had a four-second gap to Lawson before the Racing Bulls driver was suddenly on his rear wing.
“Naturally, it’s never an intention from any driver to get in the way,” said the Ferrari driver.
“Basically with the way the rules are set, when you do an out-lap and when you come round the last corner to start your lap, you have no K, so you have no battery deployment.
“You just have the ICE, so it’s something like 500bhp less.
“There’s no guidelines also on how big a gap you have to understand the closing speed that you are going to have with a guy that’s on a lap.
“I was four seconds ahead, I thought ‘this looks big enough’, got on the power and once I got into [Turn] 18 the speed deficit was huge and there was nowhere I could go at that point. So unfortunate.”
Hamilton believes the blame for such incidents belongs to the FIA and its power unit regulations, not the drivers.
“That’s not the drivers’ fault,” he insisted. “That’s what the FIA did with the decisions at the beginning of the year and we’re trying to manage the best we can as drivers on track in finding the right gaps and not getting in the way of people.”
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The seven-time world champion is hoping the drivers and the FIA can figure out a solution before Friday’s qualifying.
“We’ll talk about it in the drivers’ briefing and hopefully we will come to some sort of conclusion,” he said.
“We are going to have an interesting discussion if there’s a penalty from this, because it’s Friday [Thursday practice] and it’s not changed anybody’s weekend. Hopefully they’ve understood and we’ll work together to make sure this doesn’t happen [again].”
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