F1 News, Reports and Race Results

Vettel unhappy with penalty for Massa incident

Sebastian Vettel feels he should not have been penalised for forcing Felipe Massa off the track during the British Grand Prix because he lost control of his car.

Fighting over ninth place on lap 38, Vettel attacked Massa into Turn 3 and had to correct his Ferrari under braking as he ran wide himself. With Massa on the outside, the Williams was forced off the circuit as a result, and the stewards handed Vettel a five-second time penalty for forcing another car off the track.

Vettel managed to pull enough of a gap over Daniil Kvyat to ensure he held on to ninth place, but the Ferrari driver was still unhappy with the decision.

"I was on the inside, he went a little bit wide at Turn 1, he was on the inside for Turn 3," Vettel explained. "We basically hit the brakes at the same time, I was trying to turn in and every time I tried to turn in I lost the car, lost the car, lost the car. So I had to open up and went wide myself.

"Obviously there was no intention to force him off the track because I was going off the track as well so it wasn’t something that I controlled, but for some reason the stewards took the view that I did that on purpose and I got the penalty. But I think it was a racing incident."

Having started from 11th, Vettel was happy with Ferrari's strategy as the first team to opt for slick tyres on the drying track and says his own errors cost him a better result.

"It was a bit of an eventful race. The call was very good so we decided to be the first car to come in and it was absolutely the right thing to do. I think we gained a lot of places but obviously then I went wide at Turn 1 and coming back to the dry with wet tyres I lost the car and spun. Then I lost a lot of time when I went onto the grass and spun once more.

"That was down to me and after that obviously we were quite a long way out and it was a bit difficult to go through traffic and really make a lot of progress when the field was spread out."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.