The FIA deemed the incident between Bruno Senna and Michael Schumacher the fault of the veteran driver from Germany. According to Schumacher, the result of his collision was due to a weaving Senna but the race stewards saw it differently. Veteran Tom Kristensen was on hand in Spain as the official driver in a steward role and he’s seen a few incidents in his day.
Schumacher said of the incident:
“Obviously I am not happy with the outcome of the race as I think we could have achieved some nice points today. But then this is sometimes what you have to go through in racing. It is not easy to see from the TV replays but what happened from my viewpoint was that he [Senna] went to the right to defend the inside line, and then suddenly, shortly before the braking point, went to the left. When you are so tight together in the braking zone, you have no other choice than to try to react and avoid hitting but it was too late.”
Senna said:
“Of course, he’s not going to say it’s his fault but at the end of the day he had much newer tyres than me. I was on very old rubber, so I guess our braking points were uneven for turn one… When I went to brake, he probably just tried to cross and he hit me.”
We’ve discussed the incident here and many feel that Schumacher was at fault but one wonders if this a case of penalizing outcomes rather than intent or if it is a clear-cut case of intent and ultimately the unfortunate outcome. What do you think? Does it seem as if the penalty is fair and that the stewards were indeed penalizing the intent as avoidable and not just the outcome or are the two issues not mutually exclusive?
