There are only 22 cars in the F-1 line-up, but the drivers still manage to trip over each other regularly.
After crashing with Felipe Massa in the Australian Grand Prix, an irate David Coulthard said he would demand an apology from Massa and give him a good thrashing if it was not forthcoming. DC used more colorful language, however.
Showing a sense of humor, the FIA put the pair in the front row of an official press conference in here in Malaysia. They stared stonily ahead and refused to look at each other.
Massa says he won’t apologize.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “When I do something wrong, I will apologize, but this time I don’t need to.
“I tried to pass him. I was inside and he closed [the door on] me and we crashed. I think everybody knows two cars cannot be in the same place in a corner.”
Coulthard said: “Quite clearly my eyes point forward, they don’t point rearward. He’s got a much clearer view as to how much space there is, and I didn’t take a different line than I took any other lap.”
Later, however, DC privately apologized to Massa so that they could put the clash behind them.
Robert Kubica and Kazuki Nakajima, who also crashed in Australia and who were also in the press conference, were laid back about it all and wrote it off as a racing incident.
During qualifying here in Malaysia, another incident could have resulted in a huge accident, but fortunately it did not.
McLaren Mercedes drivers Heikki Kovalainen and Lewis Hamilton were each demoted five grid places, to eighth and ninth respectively, for impeding the qualifying laps of Nick Heidfeld and Fernando Alonso.
The McLaren duo had completed their fastest laps in Q3 as had four other drivers. All were taking their cool-down laps extremely slowly to conserve fuel because they have to start the race with the amount of fuel that was in the tank at the end of qualifying. Heidfeld and Alonso, still on their fast laps, encountered the slow cars.
“We had four in turn four, and then the two Ferraris I think somewhere else, so six cars or something like that,” Alonso said. “Four of them were off line, not disturbing [anyone], and two of them were on the racing line. They are running at 60 kph [36 mph] and we are at 300 kph [186 mph], so it is too big a difference in speed and a little bit dangerous.”
Those two were the McLarens. Heidfeld reckons he lost .2 of a second swerving around them, enough to drop him from third to seventh. He moved up to fifth because of the penalties and Alonso went from ninth to seventh.
“Neither of our drivers did it intentionally,” said McLaren’s Martin Whitmarsh. “They did all they could to squeeze over to allow Nick and Fernando to do their quick laps. We informed our drivers that there were people trying to do their flying laps. There was congestion at one part of the circuit with six cars trying to go into one corner.”
So that this dangerous situation does not arise again, new rules should mandate that a driver’s cool down lap time should be within 110 percent of his fastest lap.