FORMULA ONE DRIVERS reacted with fury after AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly passed a tractor on the track at the Japanese Grand Prix on Sunday, on the same Suzuka circuit where Jules Bianchi suffered a fatal accident in similar circumstances.
Gasly said he “would be dead right now” if he had hit the vehicle, which was deployed to recover Carlos Sainz’s car after the Spaniard crashed in heavy rain on a chaotic first lap.
French driver Bianchi suffered a fatal crash at Suzuka in October 2014 when he collided with a tractor crane that was recovering a car.
He underwent emergency surgery and was placed in an induced coma, but never recovered and died in July 2015.
Gasly called Sunday’s incident “not acceptable”.
“We lost Jules eight years ago in similar conditions, with a crane on track in the gravel,” said the Frenchman.
“I don’t understand how eight years later, in similar conditions, we can see a crane — not even in the gravel, on the racing line.”
“It is not respectful to Jules, his family, or his loved ones, or all of us,” he added.
Sunday’s race began amid heavy rainfall and was red-flagged on the third lap.
Gasly was later adjudged to have been speeding under red-flag conditions.
The French driver tried to catch the field behind the safety car, having pitted to remove an advertising board that had stuck to the front of his car after Sainz had dislodged it in his crash.
Race organisers said that Gasly “understood that there could be marshals or obstacles on the track” and that he had “admitted that he was too fast”.
But the incident prompted fury from other drivers, who said Gasly was lucky to escape unscathed.
“In any conditions, we should never see a crane on track while the cars are out there,” said Red Bull’s Sergio Perez, who finished second.
“You don’t know what could happen. It doesn’t matter about the conditions — it should just never happen.”
Bianchi’s father Philippe posted on Instagram shortly after the incident, circling the recovery vehicle in a screenshot of Gasly’s onboard camera with the caption: “No respect for the life of the driver no respect for Jules memory incredible.”
Perez’s Red Bull teammate Max Verstappen said hitting the tractor would have been dangerous “at any speed”.
“When you are behind, you always try to drive out of the spray, you go left or you go right because you can’t really see anything,” said Verstappen, who won the race and clinched his second straight world title.
“That is when things happen.”
The FIA, Formula One’s governing body, said normal procedures had been followed but pledged that there would be a “thorough review” after taking feedback from drivers.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was among those calling for a full investigation into the incident.
“We lost Jules Bianchi here eight years ago and that should never, ever happen,” he told Sky Sports F1.
“There needs to be a full investigation into why there was a recovery vehicle on the circuit.”
Sainz said: “Even behind a safety car we are going at 100 or 150kph and still at those speeds we don’t see nothing.
“I still don’t know why we keep risking, in these conditions, having a tractor on track. You were going to red flag it anyway, so why risk it?”
– © AFP 2022 with reporting from Press Association
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