Can anyone tell me why the F1 race wasn't restarted? I thought that when they had a amjor smash on the first corner they usually stopped the race and restarted it??

Was there any explanation given? (We have Japanese commentary )

It seemed a shame that after the first corner only about half of the field was still running.....

 

Yes, it's a shame that so many missed out, but the race is 'usually' only red-flagged when the course is blocked.
Aussie corner workers were very quick in removing cars and major debris
The less safety car the better as far as I'm concerned....one thing I miss about the 'old' days of F1. If the course is dangerous enough for a safety car (for more than a lap or two) then the race should be red flagged.

 

I definitley think that at that stage of the race, bringing the safety car out is not a good thing. There were so many drivers involved that could have used their spare cars had the race been restarted. I don't think that the crowd would have minded waiting for a restart rather than only getting to see "half a race" as it turned out to be.....

 

On the hard...

If marshals continue to not allow restarts this greatly reduce the sort of first turn behavior we saw Sunday.

 

I can see your point there, but the rash actions of one driver (Barrichello???) ended the race for almost half of the drivers.

I am not sure whether he had time for the potential consequences of his actions to go through his mind at that point......

Just a thought....

 

the big problem is the decision making process has to happen very fast after the accident - otherwise there is a chaos and people will believe that certain teams have been favored after lobbying.

they normally red flag when somebody has been hurt - which in this case nobody was.

What they are missing is tougher penalties for dangerous driving - either near misses or actual crashes are just brushed off as "racing incidents". Between two cars during the race - maybe OK - but when the driving threatens the whole field then the organisers need to take tough action - even against the star drivers. The paying public, the sponsors have been robbed of their money otherwise.

M.Schumacher was one of the worst for this a few seasons ago as he struggled to start against the Mclarens - he veered all over the track - but nothing was done. Rubens believed he could do the same too since he was in pole.

 

Like Kobe says, Charlie Whiting and the other race directors have to make a very quick decision. Prior to the race CW had told the drivers in the breifing that he was going to take a hard line on restarts for circumstances like what occured (baring injury of course) - like ElTianti says there are too many cases where the drivers get to restart the race after a rash manouver in the opening moments (Michael Schumacher is particularly guilty of this - anyone else remember his trick in the Austrian GP a couple of seasons ago where he pulled his stricken car back onto the racing line to try and force a red flag )

Red flags make for better racing as there it allows more cars in the race and don't penalise those innocent parties caught up in the incidents. As it happens I thought Sunday's GP had a lot of great action (MS v JPM / JPM v KR) and of course Minardi and Toyota got points which was great for them.

 

it seems Rubens and Ralf have escaped with the "racing incident" no blame attached - usual sitting on the fence stuff to appease the big teams.

I think some kind suspended penalty should be enforced for first corner crashes, so any further infringement by them should lose points (if they have any!).

I don't want to have rolling starts like in US racing - nothing beats the buzz of the lights going out and 20 F1 cars launching at the same time.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Kobe
[B]it seems Rubens and Ralf have escaped with the "racing incident"

 

what they should have done is asked for the data logs from Rubens and Ralf's car and checked the braking points versus their other laps - it would be interesting to see if Rubens gave Ralf a "break test" - remember Mark Blundell did that to Rubens a few years ago at Silverstone when he was with Mclaren - he got warned for that.