So Pastor Maldonado made a clear and obvious mistake. That much is indisputable. But go careful with those demands for an instant race ban. It's argument which, once the subjectivism of antipathy towards a driver with a big temper and an even bigger wallet, and the very natural reaction that Something Must Be Done after Esteban Gutierrez was spent spiralling airborne has been removed, doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
If you've not seen Ron Dennis' withering denouncement of F1's ridiculous 'Ratnering' - as it must be called after Pat Symonds' equally-eloquent denouncement of the sport's current self-loathing - then don't prolong the mistake a moment longer. It's a tour de force in reasoned, trenchant argument. There is, of course, absolutely no reason to link the quality of a team's off-track public pronouncements with an expectation of better times ahead on the tarmac, but, even still, you can't help but feel that McLaren will, like their boss, be back in power again soon.
Too frequently anonymous but occasionally sensationally brilliant, Sergio Perez will never be a seven-out-of-ten driver. When driving for a top team, as we saw last year, the bouts of anonymity are anathema to retention. But for a midfield outfit, as Sauber and now Force India can testify, frequent anonymity is a small burden to accept in return for the occasional race-long flash of brilliance. Especially when the results are priceless: Sunday's breakthrough was Force India's first podium score since 2009 while Perez's hat-trick in 2012 still accounts for three of Sauber's four top-three finishes since the days of BMW.
There was a triple giveaway, surely, that the pole sitter started on the wrong side of the grid on Sunday. First, Nico Rosberg lined-up at the start pointing to the opposite corner of the track. Second, he was beaten to the apex of the first corner despite actually holding the lead all the way to Turn One (watch the replay again and note that Rosberg's car is fractionally ahead of Hamilton's all the way to the pit-exit before swinging back to the left-hand side of the track to keep a car's width of tarmac for his opponent). Third, a driver invariably preferred to hold the inside line whenever he was wheel-to-wheel with another into the first corner for the rest of the race. The semi-official reason for putting the pole-sitter on the left-hand side of the track is that it's considered, with unanimity, to be the clean side and therefore advantageous. Yet has anyone thought about asking the pole-sitter on which side he'd prefer? Or, to put the question a different way, wouldn't it be a fun addition to the weekend's jamboree if the pole-sitter was permitted to choose where he'd like to start after qualifying? Ferrari are nowhere on and off the track
While Ferrari's insistence that their criticism of the new regulations is borne of benevolence towards the sport itself and entirely detached from self-interest, it's inevitable that the symmetry between their on-track struggles and the scale of their off-track opposition will not be considered a simple coincidence. It reeks and the sooner they realise as much the better. PG