Originally Posted by BTCC frog
My personal view is that, when somebody cheats, it doesn't make sense to declare the entire race null and void. I don't know where Bernie Ecclestone got the idea that this is somehow what is supposed to happen, but find it hard to believe much that comes out of his mouth anyway nowadays, and he might just be deliberately stirring the pot. If the race has to be annulled because someone cheats, doesn't the same apply to any race involving any cheating from anybody in history. So every race in 1984 bar the last three is scrapped because of Tyrrell and Alain Prost takes the title on 18 points, but countback with two wins over Niki Lauda. And if cheating makes a race invalid, then surely the drivers and teams are racing assuming that the Singapore GP counted so the final three races are sort of dependent on the race having happened, and if the mentality is that races with cheating need to be declared null and void, you could say the same about the entire championship. In short, to take away Lewis Hamilton's championship, particularly 15 years later, would be nothing short of insanity. Fernando Alonso's win should have been taken away at the time that they found out in 2009, although perhaps with no winner for that race rather than promoting anybody, but again, 15 years later seems a bit silly and I don't mind that Alonso is listed as the winner of that race anyway, because it makes for an interesting quirky story about Formula 1 history.
A second thing I would say is that Felipe Massa didn't lose the championship because of Crashgate. The safety car was practically irrelevant to the fuel rig problem that lost Massa the lead, and it could have happened in a normal race situation. He lost out in that race because of a Ferrari blunder. A weird similarity that this reminded me of was the League One season in 2019/20. At the start of the year, Bolton were in dire financial trouble and looked like they might go bust, as Bury already had in the same season. They were playing a team of inexperienced players and Ipswich Town beat them 5-0 at he start of the year, but Coventry City drew 0-0 with them. A few weeks later there was talk of Bolton going bust, which would mean that every game they played was declared null and void. I thought this was unfair that Ipswich would lose three points from it, while Coventry, who had failed to beat them, had their poor result deleted. In the end, Bolton survived and so the problem never actually became reality. But I would feel the same way if Singapore was invalidated and took away Ferrari's mistake. It would not be Felipe Massa getting justice for a title stolen from him, it would be him fluking the championship because the race that was invalidated happened to be one that went badly for him.
Another thought from the situation is that it is not a good look when it is so easy for a team to completely manipulate a race like Renault did in Singapore. On this occasion it was fixed, but it is perfectly possible that Piquet Jr could have crashed for real at the exact moment, and so a team that had been running outside the top ten could be put in prime position to win the Grand Prix, through complete luck, because of the stupid rule in place at the time that drivers couldn't pit for fuel immediately behind the safety car. It is less important now but continues to be the case that luck can play a huge part in the outcome of races because of the safety car and red flag. We saw it in Zandvoort last year when Tsunoda's retirement effectively gifted Verstappen victory (until another safety car spiced things up again), and I had suspicions at the time that it was the second edition of Crashgate. And with red flags now being used abundantly and at totally random moments, the opposite can happen with one drivers race being completely ruined through no fault of their own if a red flag comes out at a bad time, as was the case for George Russell and Carlos Sainz in Australia.
Personally, I think things need to change to prioritise sport over show in regards to race neutralisations. Firstly, the VSC needs to be used far more often, and the pitlane should be closed behind the VSC. With refuelling no longer a thing, this means that it is impossible for any driver to gain or lose any kind of unfair advantage behind the Virtual Safety Car. Meanwhile, if a red flag is used, aggregate times should be used for the races before and after the stoppage as they were in the past. Maybe it would make things a little less exciting but this is a sport, with huge amounts of money and dedication pumped into it. It needs to be more fair than it is at the moment. The safety car would then be the only type of neutralisation that can cause unfair advantages but it would be used far less often than it is currently. I think this would make Formula 1 more fair and reduce the element of luck.
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