All the signs are that the FIA has accepted that Lewis Hamilton was put in a very difficult position by his team and this may mean that McLaren will be more likely to incur the penalty than their world champion driver, writes Alan Henry.
The beleaguered McLaren team were left fire fighting on several fronts when it became clear that it is likely they will be investigated by the FIA world motor sport council following suggestions that Lewis Hamilton and the suspended team sporting director Dave Ryan lied to a meeting of stewards investigating rule infringements in the Australian Grand Prix.
Max Mosley, president of the ruling body, the FIA, said: “There may be a report to the world council. If there is, I will almost certainly be one of the people there to decide what happens. Therefore it would be completely wrong for me to discuss the rights and wrongs of the situation.”
That news came on a day when Hamilton could only struggle home a distant seventh in the rain-spoilt Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang. His team-mate, Heikki Kovalainen, fared no better, spinning off into a trackside gravel trap early in the event, one of only two drivers forced to retire from the race.
It was a result which added to the stress in the team’s pit lane garage where the team principal, Martin Whitmarsh, was considering whether it would be appropriate for him to resign.
Whitmarsh had earlier made it clear that his future was in the hands of Mercedes, a 40% stakeholder in McLaren, and their other investors. There is a further 30% in the hands of Bahrain’s state-owned Mumtalakat holding company with the remaining shares held equally by the chairman Ron Dennis and his Saudi business partner Mansour Ojjeh, one of the founders of McLaren.
“I’m not resigning this weekend,” said Whitmarsh. “In the longer term, I can contemplate my own future. Of course it’s not self-determining. It’s for the shareholders of this team to take a view and they will have to decide what’s the best thing.”
He added: “We’ve made a commitment to look at how we arrived in this situation and we’ve got to learn from it and do a better job. Therefore it would be wrong to rule anything out. I think I’ve got to look at what is the best way forward for this team.”
There has been much speculation that Hamilton had become unsettled and insecure and that he might want to leave the team but Whitmarsh said that there was no evidence to think this is the case.
The Mercedes motor sport vice-president, Norbert Haug, said the German manufacturer would discuss the situation soon.
“I am in permanent contact with Stuttgart ... and of course we will sit down next week,” he said, adding that he personally had “full trust” in Whitmarsh. “He’s a great guy and runs the team in a very good way.”
The furore erupted on April 2 after stewards reopened an inquiry from the season-opener in Australia where McLaren’s world champion Hamilton was promoted from fourth to third at the expense of Toyota’s Jarno Trulli.
Trulli was deemed to have overtaken Hamilton illegally while the safety car was deployed but the Italian told stewards that the Briton, who had earlier gone past the Toyota, had slowed to let him through.
Hamilton denied he had been told to do so but a radio conversation between him and the team during the race showed that not to be the case. Later, he was disqualified from the Australian Grand Prix.
McLaren and Hamilton have publicly apologised for misleading the stewards and the team suspended its sporting director, Dave Ryan, but further sanctions could follow Hamilton’s disqualification from the Australian race. Whitmarsh admitted that he had made a “big misjudgement” in deciding to go on holiday afterwards instead of travelling straight to Sepang. “The team learnt of the stewards’ hearing at about 10.30 on Thursday (April 2) morning. I was travelling here at the time and Davey and Lewis attended that hearing. I arrived after the hearing and in the aftermath of it,” he explained.
“I happened to be travelling in that period of time and one of the criticisms levelled against me is that I was on holiday and didn’t arrive here in time, and I’ve got a lot of deep regret about that.
“But clearly as I left Australia on Sunday (March 29) evening I wasn’t aware of an issue, an issue that started to be reported on Wednesday (April 1), which I was told about but frankly I did not believe the scale of it or the speed of it. I didn’t know that the Australian stewards would be here and I didn’t imagine — and frankly this was a big misjudgement on my part — that there was going to be a stewards’ hearing here.”
The F1 commercial rights holder, Bernie Ecclestone, dismissed any suggestion that Hamilton was in danger of losing public goodwill. “I don’t think in any shape or form (Hamilton will suffer long-term damage to his reputation),” he told the BBC.
“He was put in a position where it looked as though he was telling a lie. But I don’t think he went to see the stewards with that intention.”
All the signs are that the FIA has accepted that Hamilton was put in a very difficult position by his team and this may mean that McLaren will be more likely to incur the penalty than their world champion driver.
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