F1 Had a Hamilton-Verstappen Photo Finish, So Why Is Everyone Mad at Michael Masi?

Throughout the closest F1 championship in the sport’s history, the duel between Red Bull's Max Verstappen and Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton has always involved a third-party antagonist: F1 officials, and their wild inconsistency. On Sunday at the season finale in Abu Dhabi, any remaining doubts about F1 Race Director Michael Masi and F1's overall officiating were laid to rest as the championship was decided by an unusual race-restart that guaranteed Verstappen an empty-net shot at the championship and a staged photo finish. 

Verstappen, with his path to the first-place Hamilton miraculously clear as the race resumed from behind a safety car for one lap of racing, easily passed the Mercedes driver breaking Hamilton's long streak of championships and giving Red Bull its first driver's champion since 2013.

In many ways it was a very fitting end to the season and to the hard-fought championship: an inconsistently officiated race ended with a slightly desperate "divide the child" ruling from Masi that could not help but favor one contestant even as it was portrayed as promoting good racing. On the other hand, it guaranteed that even at the very end of what will be a legendary championship battle, F1 officials would remain at the center of it, all thumbs as they tried to balance the scales of fair competition.

In a vacuum, the ending of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Sunday would have done more than raise-eyebrows, but you almost have to go in reverse order through the major moments of these final races of the season to understand why everyone hates F1 Race Director Michael Masi, or at least holds him in sympathetic contempt for botching a tough job.

In the race's last ten laps, Lewis Hamilton was slightly-uncomfortably cruising to a race-and-championship victory. He was on very old Hard compound Pirelli tires, while Verstappen was trying to chase him down from behind on much fresher ones. But Verstappen was not going fast enough to catch Hamilton before the end of the race, especially with a cluster of lapped cars ahead of him dueling for points. Being a lap ahead of that traffic, Verstappen would have right-of-way to pass them, but they were not obliged to suspend their own racing to make way for him. So he would have to pick his way across a completely different F1 battlefield just to get back to his one-on-one duel with Hamilton, who had already cleared that traffic. There was still an outside chance that Hamilton's tires would suddenly hit the "performance cliff" in which they still function as tires but no longer provide effective grip, in which case perhaps Verstappen could make up several seconds a lap to reach Hamilton and perhaps make a last-minute pass, but it was very unlikely and Red Bull boss Christian Horner sounded resigned to Hamilton's victory when he spoke to Sky Sports' David Croft and Martin Brundle toward the end of the race.

However, that foregone conclusion was thrown into doubt on lap 53 of 58 when Nicholas Latifi's Williams had a hard skid into the wall, leaving a car stranded at the exit of a corner and debris scattered everywhere. There was zero doubt that the crash would require a Safety Car to slow down the field and guide it past the site so that course workers could safely recover the car and clear-up debris.

In the lead, Hamilton and Mercedes elected to stay out on his old tires. Verstappen, with the field slowed-down by the safety car, went into the pits for fresh Soft tires. He would restart the race with the "grippiest" tires and would easily have a faster pace than Hamilton. He came out of the pits still in second place behind Hamilton, but also still stuck behind that dense pod of traffic he encountered before. Furthermore, it was unclear whether the race would be able to resume. Laps under the Safety Car count for the full distance, and as course workers and marshalls removed Latifi's car, the race was winding down.

When F1 races restart from a Safety Car, the procedure involves some very slow but routine steps. Once the track is clear, lapped cars are often allowed to unlap themselves. They break out of formation, speed ahead of the safety car, and loop around the track to resume their places at the back of the formation. In this way, cars are lined up on track in the way they are lined up in terms of places. This way, there's no confusion about who is racing for an actual contested position and who is simply overtaking a slower lapped car that is not an immediate competitor. 

Now, any longtime racing fan knows this procedure often has the benefit of compressing the racing field and sparking more fights for position, and the "safety car" sometimes feels like a way to generate more competitive and interesting races more than it is a crucial safety protocol. Nevertheless, this is the framework F1 has adopted with resuming races from a Safety Car condition. When the cars are finally back in formation, the teams and drivers receive a notice: "SAFETY CAR IN THIS LAP", which means that racing will resume at the start of the next lap. In practice, it resumes a bit earlier than that because the first-place driver has the luxury of setting the pace as the field approaches the starting line. The minute the leader takes off at race pace, the rest of the field is free to speed up to racing speed as well. There's always a little bit of strategy around this moment, but in essence, this is how restarts work.

Had this exact procedure been followed, there's a very good chance that the race would have ended under a safety car. That's because there is a rule in F1's Sporting Regulations for this situation, rule 48.12, which says, "...Once the last lapped car has passed the leader the safety car will return to the pits at the end of the following lap." Ergo, letting so-called "backmarkers" unlap themselves delays the restart by a lap.

However, the director is allowed discretion here to send a message that "OVERTAKING WILL NOT BE PERMITTED" which cancels this part of the procedure. Ostensibly this is all for safety but this exact clause gets a bit weasel-worded and leaves it to whether the director feels track conditions are suitable for overtaking.

Masi proceeded to massively expand this gray area in the dying moments of the Abu Dhabi GP. He issued the notice that no overtaking would be permitted, which would have left five cars racing for position between Verstappen in second place and Hamilton in the lead. At around this point, as he has throughout the season, he got a peevish radio message from Christian Horner demanding to know why the lapped cars would not be moved aside. Masi stammered that Horner should give him a minute, that Masi's focus was on clearing the Latifi incident. Horner huffed that it should only have taken a lap to accomplish that, and the conversation ended.

Then, on lap 57, something unprecedented happened. Masi directed that only five lapped cars would be allowed to overtake: the five cars between Hamilton and Norris. Then he sent the "Safety Car in this lap" message, meaning that racing would immediately resume after lap 57. The five backmarkers were moved ahead of the safety car and Verstappen was now allowed to pull up right behind and indeed right alongside Hamilton.

This sealed the race for Verstappen. The Mercedes and Red Bull cars are fairly evenly matched, though in the last quarter of this long season the Mercedes had a definitive edge. But tire wear is the single most decisive element in car performance in F1, determining how fast you can take corners, how late you can brake for them, and how early you can get back on the power. Hamilton was on the longest-lasting but least high-performance of the three tire compounds Pirelli sent to Abu Dhabi, but they were incredibly old by this stage of the race. Verstappen was on brand-new high-performance tires. From this restart position, the outcome was never in doubt.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff knew as much when he howled at Masi over the radio that this wasn't right. Masi, in an uncharacteristically snide message, said, "Toto, it’s called a motor race. Okay? We went car racing.”

One can understand why Masi might have been fed up. Wolff, Horner, and their respective proxies have been in Masi's face throughout the season, constantly lobbying him for a favorable decision or yelling at him about decisions that weren't even in his hands. But the tenor of that final message to Wolff, as Masi invented a new restart procedure that would tip the race and the championship toward Red Bull and Verstappen, hardly came across as level-headed or fair-minded.

Verstappen easily passed Hamilton for the championship, but Masi's decision have overshadowed the outcome that they did so much to determine. Indeed, the Stewards for the Grand Prix issued a somewhat tepid defense of Masi's decisions even as they rejected Mercedes' protest of the outcome, noting that Masi only partially applied rule 48.12. While they dismissed Mercedes protest, they wrote: "Notwithstanding Mercedes' request that the Stewards remediate the matter by amending the classification to reflect positions at the end of the penultimate lap, this is a step that the Stewards believe is effectively shortening the race retrospectively, and hence not appropriate." Ultimately, the Stewards' decision didn't so much vindicate Masi's decisions as it did acknowledge he probably had the right to make them, and refuse to undertake the drastic steps that would be required to account for Masi's impact on the race. Mercedes has since confirmed they will be appealing the decision.

However, Masi's last minute intervention in favor of Verstappen won't stop him being blamed by Verstappen and countless other drivers for something he has little control over: F1 officiating. After all, at the start of the Abu Dhabi GP race, Hamilton appeared to cut a corner in exactly the same fashion the Verstappen had done back at last week's Saudi Arabian GP, and for which he had been made to cede the position back to Hamilton. This time, no action was taken and Hamilton was allowed to drive-off into the distance having retained his lead by leaving the track. It wasn't cut-and-dried but it least least merited some consideration from the Stewards, yet this time they endorsed the maneuver.

As the face of F1 race direction and officials' rulings, Masi gets treated like he is responsible for these decisions. But in fact, when it comes to determining what is fair or unfair in racing (in what is perhaps the most subjective sport imaginable), Masi is more messenger than judge and jury.

Actual officiating, deciding right and wrong when it comes to racing, falls to a group called the Stewards. The Stewards are typically groups of ex-or-current race car drivers who will look at incidents that occur during a race, and first decide whether it's something that may need a closer look and second whether it deserves a penalty, which usually comes in the form of having time added to the end of a driver's race or forcing the driver to spend extra time in the pits.

Crucially, the Stewards change from race-to-race. Which means you will have the same rules applied to similar incidents with drastically different outcomes. So this week at Abu Dhabi, the stewards declared that Hamilton was in-bound when he cut a corner, while last week at Jeddah Verstappen was constantly under investigation for rules violations. However, if Verstappen was outside the lines in Jeddah, then he was certainly outside the lines in Brazil where different stewards opted to conduct no review at all when Verstappen defended his position by steering straight off the track and forcing Hamilton off the road. That kind of inconsistency, which has left lots of drivers feeling aggrieved at receiving what feel like arbitrary penalties, is probably why we had Masi, back at Jeddah, offering Red Bull a deal in which they'd voluntarily accept a demotion within the field, implicitly working together with one of the major teams to try and keep a potentially championship-altering decision out of the stewards' hands.

It's the kind of thing you probably want a Race Director doing in order to find settlements everyone can be happy with and that preclude the involvement of capricious stewards. But even there, Masi kind of fouled-up a simple conversation. He was making the offer in error, having failed to notice what the actual running order of the cars was when the red flag was called. When Red Bull eagerly accepted an offer that would have left them ahead of Hamilton, Masi had to retract and sheepishly clarify that he was proposing moving Verstappen behind Hamilton into third place.

However, Masi has let himself in for a miserable time by adopting a studied helplessness in his handling of on-track controversy. In public statements and in direct messages with the teams, he has often been at pains to point out that he is not the person making rulings, that he is merely a conduit to the stewards who undertake to review and adjudicate the actions of race drivers. He has consciously rejected the moral authority that his predecessor Charlie Whiting wielded over the sport, perhaps wisely recognizing that moral authority was Whiting's alone (and frankly looks better through rose-tinted goggles than it often did during his tenure) and did not pass on to Masi along with the job did following Whiting's untimely death. Still, the disingenuousness of Masi's framing was made clear in Jeddah where he was caught playing the role of judge that a race director must play at times, trying to keep the unreliable jury of stewards out of the battle between Hamilton and Verstappen. What had been a kind of lofty detachment from the fray of teams and drivers suddenly looked a lot more like a hesitancy to play his proper role. With his last-minute decisionmaking at the season finale at Abu Dhabi, that hesitancy looks like it may have been well-founded.

Or perhaps it was a job well done. As I said above, F1 got a photo finish. In the years to come, that pass will replayed as part of sizzle reels and maybe it will become That Pass. F1 has always been a reality show, a political circus where hard, fair racing is the ideal but grubby backroom dealmaking and ruthless politicking has become, by necessity, part of the show. If you just wanted good racing, maybe you'd watch Indycars or sports cars. F1's brand is that it is the pinnacle of motorsport, populated with outsized characters and plenty of court intrigue and courtroom drama. In stage directing an outcome that will generate endless controversy and retrospective analysis, Masi might be nothing more or less than a company man for the most expensive traveling circus in the world.