Red Bull rivals not in favour of FIA investigating Perez

Red Bull's leading rivals have no interest in lobbying the FIA to launch an investigation into Sergio Perez's crash last May in Monaco.

The Mexican's contact with the barriers in the final minutes of qualifying in the Principality triggered a red flag that ended the session, which also sealed pole position for Perez just as his Red Bull teammate Max Verstappen was on his final flyer and improving.

The incident was revisited last weekend in Brazil after Verstappen rejected a team order favoring Perez, which led to speculation that the Dutchman's snub was payback for what he believed had been Perez's deliberate crash in Monaco.

In the wake of last weekend's controversy, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem said that he would be open to investigating Perez's crash if a formal complaint was lodged with the governing body.

But F1's top teams have no interest in revisiting the past.

"What happened in Monaco is very difficult to judge from outside," said Binotto.

"I don’t think we can judge and it’s not down to us to do it. The FIA has the data, I’m pretty sure they looked at it at the time and we need to move forward.

"I think that moving forward, maybe we should discuss what we should do in that type of situation, but I don’t think there is a clear answer right now. There was a point yesterday at the F1 Commission, Zak [Brown, McLaren chairman] raised it. Let’s maybe start the discussion.

"But more important for us now I think is really moving forward. I don’t think there is any need to review what happened in Monaco today."

• Read also: FIA 'more than happy' to investigate Perez's Monaco crash

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff doubts that Perez would have put his own race in jeopardy by deliberately crashing at Portiers in Monaco while also suggesting that Red Bull has perhaps suffered its fair share of PR crisis.

"We haven’t got the data," he said of Perez’s crash.

"Monaco is pretty bad in GPS. And the second thing is, I’ve known Sergio for a long time. Would a driver really put his car in the wall and risk his gearbox?

"And the way it was done, you could be going all the way to the back of the grid with such an incident.

"If you want to park your car you do it in a different way. And we had enough PR crises in the last couple of weeks around that team, we don’t need another one."

McLaren boss Zak Brown also saw no reason to shed a light on an incident that is now too far off in the past.
"It was quite some time ago, so I think we need to, as a sport, if we see something that needs to be investigated move more swiftly," said Brown.

"Monaco was a long time ago and to be talking about Monaco and Abu Dhabi [2021], I think that train’s left the station."

Regarding how red flag incidents in qualifying should be dealt with in the future, Brown believes F1 should take a leaf out of IndyCar's sporting rules and strip drivers who cause a red flag of their best time.

"It should be red flags or yellow flags – effectively impeding a driver from completing the lap," said Brown of the potential rule change he had also suggested.

"They do that in other forms of motorsports where the penalty is you just lose your fastest lap from that session. All the drivers tend to do one-lap runs so that would penalise the driver if it was intentional or unintentional, right? You’ve messed up someone else’s lap so I think that’s an easy solution, can be implemented right away.

"If you cause a driver to have to back out, you lose your lap, you’ve got to go again and maybe you won’t have a chance, maybe you will or you’ll have to use another set of tyres. I think that’s the easiest way to solve it."

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