21/07/2016
NEWS STORY
Sebastian Vettel has hit out at the FIA's crackdown on radio communications which follows high-profile incidents in a number of recent races.
Keen to prevent any repeat of the move which saw Nico Rosberg advised how to get around a gearbox issue at Silverstone, which, while costing him three points due to his subsequent time penalty at least allowed him to continue racing, the FIA has acted swiftly ahead of this weekend's race in Hungary.
From now, any driver in a similar position, advised of a critical issue with his car, will be forced to pit in order to resolve the issue (or not).
Furthermore, it is now the responsibility of the teams to demonstrate that any instructions to fix a critical issue does not enhance the car's performance, though the restrictions on radio communications now only apply when the car is on track, whereas previously they applied the moment a car left its garage.
Sebastian Vettel is not impressed.
"It's complete bullshit," he told reporters. "I think all the radio issues we had are a joke.
"I looked at the race afterwards and I found, as a spectator, it was quite entertaining to hear the driver panicking a little on the radio and the team panicking at the same time," he admitted. "I think it was an element of human being in our sport, which arguably is very complicated and technical.
"I think it's the wrong way," he continued. "There's a lot of boring stuff on the radio that got banned... I don't see the point."
The German is adamant that at a time the sport's powers that be are trying to make the sport less complicated, and thereby easier to follow, the radio ban is not the way to go about it.
"If you want to change it, you should change the cars," he said. "I've no problem... let's go back to V12, manual gearbox, two buttons, one for pit speed limiter and one for radio, just to confirm that we're coming in. And other than that, not much electronics to look after, which, there's no point then to memorise all the things.
"All the buttons we have on the steering wheel today are there for a reason," he continued, "it's not like 'oh, yeah, we can build buttons, let's put them on the steering wheel'.
"If you look at the 1995 steering wheel, for example, or speak to a lot of the experts that are still around in the paddock, what they've raced with, it was a lot simpler because the cars' technology was simpler. It's nor our - as in the drivers' - mistake that the cars are so complicated these days that they need a manual and a steering wheel full of buttons to operate it.
"I think we are going a little bit in the wrong way," he added, "I think it's bad and we should just go back to being able to say what we want."
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