16/03/2014
NEWS STORY
Kamui Kobayashi has escaped punishment for the first lap incident which saw him take out Felipe Massa.
The popular Japanese driver, who has a reputation for his 'over enthusiasm' went into the first corner of today's race at high speed thumping Kimi Raikkonen and going onto hit Massa, eliminating the Brazilian and himself in the process.
Speaking later Massa was still angry at the incident which, based on his teammate's finish, could well have seen him leave Melbourne with a decent points haul.
"I'm obviously very disappointed as I had the sort of car capable of challenging for a podium today, but the incident in the first corner ruined my race," he said the official team statement. "I tried to have a calm start and not take any risks, but was hit from behind after Kobayashi braked too late and there was nothing I could do to avoid being taken out of the race. It's a shame but there are a lot of positive things that the team can take from this weekend in terms of pace and reliability."
However, speaking to Sky Sports he suggested that the stewards follow the example of Romain Grosjean following his madness at Spa in 2012 - in which he took out, amongst others, Fernando Alonso - and hand Kobayashi a race ban.
"That isn't how I wanted my first race back to go, and I'm sorry for the team and for Felipe that both our races ended early," said Kobayashi, who in the moments following the crash tweeted his apologies to the Brazilian and his team. "I had a really good start but then into turn one I made contact with Felipe. From the initial data it looked like I had a brake system issue which obviously meant I couldn't do much about the contact and when we got the car back and looked at the information in much more detail it was clear that was the problem."
Faced with finding the Japanese guilty of causing a collision, a breach of Article 16.1 d) of the FIA Formula One Sporting Regulations, the stewards, having heard from Kobayashi and the technical representatives from Caterham, and having viewed the technical data, determined that the incident was caused by a serious technical failure completely outside the control of the driver.
Having opted to take no further action regarding Kobayashi, his team was subsequentlys directed to work with the FIA Technical Delegate in determining the cause of the systems failure.
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