Formula 1 teams have rejected Lewis Hamilton's proposal to address potential traffic issues towards the end of a lap at the Baku City Circuit. The Ferrari driver was found to have impeded Liam Lawson during practice, when he was moving more slowly than the Racing Bulls driver, who was on a flying lap.
The speed difference between them was significant, as Hamilton was preparing for a push lap and so was saving his battery deployment for when he was closer to the start/finish line, towards the end of the 1.2km final straight – the longest straight on the F1 calendar – which has presented a difficult challenge for this new generation of cars using energy-poor engines.
Hamilton reprimanded for impeding Lawson
So Hamilton was conserving energy in the final corners of the lap, but that meant there was a significant speed differential between him and Lawson when the New Zealander came across him on track. Lawson said over the radio at the time of the incident that Hamilton's positioning was "so dangerous", and the stewards agreed it was a "severe" case of impeding.
Because it was a practice session and not qualifying, Hamilton escaped a sporting penalty and was instead reprimanded. That came to the relief of the Brit, who felt it would have been unfair to penalise him, as he said the current ruleset was to blame for causing the scenario.
Hamilton blames rules, not drivers
Hamilton said: "With the way that the rules are set, when you do an out lap and when you come around the last corner to start your lap, you have no 'K' – no battery deployment – you just have the ICE, basically. So it's something like 500 brake horsepower less, but there are no guidelines of how big of a gap you have to understand the closing speed that you're going to have with the guy that's on their lap.
"When I was four seconds ahead, I thought, 'This looks big enough'. So I got on the power and once I got into turn 18, the speed deficit was huge and there was nowhere I could go at that point... that's not the drivers' fault – that's what the FIA did with their decisions at the beginning of the year and we're trying to manage as best we can, as drivers, on track in finding the right gap and not getting in the way of people."
Proposal rejected at drivers' briefing
The situation was raised at the drivers' briefing on Thursday evening, after the first two hours of practice. The Race reports Hamilton's idea of giving teams more battery power to use in that section of the lap was raised at the meeting with the FIA, but that it was rejected as several other teams did not want to make changes to the deployment at such short notice.
Having already completed the first two of the three scheduled hours of practice, changing the deployment patterns would have rendered useless much of the data they gathered on Thursday and left them with just one more hour to figure out their new deployment. Hamilton will not get his wish, and will have to do better to get out of the way of others in qualifying.
